1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
2 * Major changes in release 4.3.8
6 #20157: Avoid segfault in locate when run as root. This is caused by
7 a buffer overrun, but at this time no explot mechanism is known.
9 * Major changes in release 4.3.7
13 Locate can now read old-format locate databases generated on machines
14 with a different byte order. It does this by guessing the byte order,
15 so the result is not completely reliable. If you need to share
16 databases between machines of different architectures, you should use
17 the LOCATE02 format (which has other advantages, as explained in the
22 #20014: Findutils-4.3.7 includes a patch for a potential security
23 problem in locate. When locate read an old-format database, it read
24 file names into a fixed-length buffer allocated on the heap without
25 checking for overflow. Although overflowing a heap buffer is often
26 somewhat safer than overflowing a buffer on the stack, this bug still
27 has potential security implications.
29 This bug also affected the following previous findutils releases:
31 - All releases prior to 4.2.31
32 - Findutils 4.3.0 to 4.3.6.
34 This bug has been assigned CVE number CVE-2007-2452.
38 #20128: Fix compilation error of find/tree.c on AIX with GCC.
40 #20005: Tests -mtime -n and -mtime +n incorrectly treated like -mtime n.
42 #19983: include_next causes compilation failure in findutils 4.3.6 on
45 #19981: Don't call setgroups if the function isn't available. This
46 fixes Savannah bug# 19981.
48 #19980: Don't use the functions putw() or getw() since these are not
49 in current POSIX. Use the gnulib version of wcwidth() where the
50 system does not provide it.
52 #19979: Compilation errors on BeOS
54 #19970: Cannot cast from pointer to bool using gnulib's <stdbool.h>
56 #19967: Use of __attribute((__noreturn__)) makes compilation fail with
57 some non-GCC compilers
59 #19966: find should link against -lm for modf() and fabs()
61 #19965: Compilation failure on OSF/1 4.0; non-declaration of uintmax_t
63 #19948: Assertion failure O_NOFOLLOW != 0 on IRIX 6.5
65 #19871: Typos in find.1
67 #19596: Fixed this bug again, this time in the Texinfo manual (the
68 discussion should compare %b with %s/512, not %s/1024).
70 #19416: _FORTIFY_SOURCE warn_unused_result warnings
72 * Major changes in release 4.3.6
76 #19948: Fixed an assertion failure on IRIX 6.5 (O_NOFOLLOW is defined
79 #19923: Fixed an array overrun in groups[] array of 'locate' when run by
80 or as root. This bug appears not to be exploitable. If locate is not
81 installed setuid, the bug is not exploitable. For setuid
82 installations, it is concievable that there could be an information
83 leak if the user uses the -d option or the -e option, though the
84 maintainer has been unable to provoke this on an x86 system.
86 #19871: Spurious .R directives in manpage produced error messages from
87 GNU troff. This is now fixed (they are corrected to .B).
89 #19416: The result of I/O operations in print-related actions is now
90 checked, and failures are reported. Any failure will cause find's
91 exit status to be nonzero. The predicate itself will continue to
96 A variety of changes were made to allow compilation to succeed on
99 #19983: Now compiles on DEC C V5.9-005 on Digital UNIX V4.0 (or at
102 #19970: Compile correctly on C89 systems where the "_Bool" type is not
103 provided, taking into account the limitations of the gnulib
104 replacement for stdbool.h.
106 #19967: Build successfully with C compilers that don't support the GCC
107 construct __attribute__((__noreturn__)).
109 #19966: Findutils should now build on systems which have the modf()
110 and fabs() functions in the maths library, -lm. This includes some
111 versions of HP-UX and Solaris.
113 #19965: Fixed a compilation failure on OSF/1 4.0 (no definition of the
117 * Major changes in release 4.3.5
119 ** Functional changes
121 Updatedb can now support he generation of file name databases which
122 are compatible with slocate. For some time, GNU locate has been able
125 The /proc filesystem is excluded from the locate database (by
126 default; change PRUNEPATHS to modify this behaviour).
130 #19806: The -samefile predicate might get fooled by inode reuse. We
131 now hold open a file descriptor on the reference file to prevent this.
133 #19768: Better detection of corrupted old-style locate databases
134 (e.g. if the database is too short to include a complete bigram
137 #19766: The frcode and code programs now detect write errors more
140 #19371: Fix compilation failure on systems which #define open to
141 open64 (and similarly with the close system call). This fixes
142 Savannah bug #19371, affecting AIX 5.3.
144 #19658: When cross-compiling, "make clean" no longer deletes the
145 generated file doc/regexprops.texi, because there is no way to
148 #19391: When xargs knows that the system's actual exec limit is larger
149 than the compiled-in ARG_MAX, use the system's limit without
150 generating an assertion failure.
152 #18203: A duplicate report of bug #17478.
154 #17478: Error messages from find can garble the console.
156 #16378: Assertion failure if stat() returns 00000 as the mode
157 of a file. This apparently can happen occasionally with broken NFS
160 #11668: FreeBSD extensions for time specification are now
161 implemented. In fact, these were included in findutils-4.3.3. The
162 change was listed as a functional change (whcih it is) and this bug
163 report was not mentioned.
165 ** Documentation Fixes
167 The locatedb.5 manpage now documents the (default) LOCATE02 format
168 more clearly, and also documents the slocate database format.
170 The maximum and default values applying to the -s option of xargs are
171 now documented more clearly in the manual page.
173 * Major changes in release 4.3.4
177 #19634: Test suite now passes (again) if "." is on your $PATH.
179 #19619: Findutils builds once again on Cygwin.
181 #19617: Nonexistent start points are (once again) diagnosed in
182 ftsfind. This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3.
184 #19616: Fix leaf optimisation and loop detection (which were
185 unreliable in findutils 4.3.3). This bug affected only
188 #19615: find --version no longer claims to be using FTS_CWDFD when it
189 isn't. This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3.
191 #19613: "find -L . -type f" no longer causes an assertion failure when
192 it encounters a symbolic link loop. This bug affected only
195 #19605: Issue an error message (and later return nonzero exit status)
196 if a symbolic link loop was encountered during directory traversal.
198 #19484: bigram.c and code.c fail if the first pathname recorded begins
201 #19483: Inconsistent option highlighting in updatedb manpage
203 #18414: Tests for "find -readable" are skipped for the superuser, as
204 on some systems (e.g. Cygwin with an Administrative user) users can
209 Findutils 4.3.4 includes a translation for the Ukranian language.
212 * Major changes in release 4.3.3
214 Fiundutils-4.3.3 was released on 2007-04-15.
218 #19596: Correct the comparison in the find manpage between %b and %s
219 (the divisor is 512 not 1024).
221 #18714: In the POSIX locale, vertical tabs and form feeds are not
224 #18713: Quoted but empty arguments which occur last on an xargs input
225 line are no longer ignored, but instead produce an empty argument.
227 #18554: Documented the construct -exec sh -c 'foo "$@" bar' {} +
229 #18466: we now avoid this bug by limiting "-execdir ...+"
230 to just one argument for the time being. There is a performance
231 penalty for doing this. We hope to make a better fix in a later
234 #18384: excess bracket in xargs --help
236 #18320: Zero bytes in input should give warning
238 #17437: Corrected the handling of X in symbolic permissions (such
239 as-u+w,a+X). This change actually occurred in findutils-4.3.2, but
240 the NEWS file for that release didn't mention it.
242 #17396: find -mtime -atime -ctime does not support fractional part
243 (see "Functional changes" below)
245 #14748: find -perm /zzz gives wrong result when zzz evaluates to an
248 #14535: correctly support case-folding in locate (that is, "locate
249 -i") for multibyte character environments such as UTF-8. Previously,
250 if your search string contained a character which was outside the
251 single-byte-encoding range for UTF-8 for example, then the
252 case-folding behaviour failed to work and only exact matches would be
257 ** Functional changes
259 The -printf action (and similar related actions) now support %S,
260 which is a measurement of the sparseness of a file.
262 The test "-perm /000" now matches all files instead of no files. For
263 over a year find has been issuing warning messages indicating that
264 this change will happen. We now issue a warning indicating that the
265 change has already happened (in 4.3.x only, there is no plan to make
266 this change in the 4.2.x series).
268 The tests -newer, -anewer, -cnewer, -mtime, -atime, -ctime, -amin,
269 -cmin, -mmin and -used now support sub-second timestamps, including
270 the ability to specify times with non-integer arguments.
272 The -printf format specifiers also support sub-second timestamps:
281 The new test -newerXY supports comparison between status times for
282 files. One of the status times for a file being considered (denoted
283 X) is checked against a reference time (denoted Y) for the file whose
284 name id the argument. X and Y can be:
287 B Birth time (st_birthtime, currently unsupported)
290 t Valid only for the reference time; instead of comparison
291 against a file status time, the argument is a time string.
294 For example, -newermm is equivalent to -newer, and -neweram is true if
295 the file being considered was accessed more recently than the
296 reference file was modified. The -newerXY test supports subsecond
297 timestamps where these are available. The X=B variant is not yet
300 If you configure the sourec code and then run the tests with "make
301 check", the test suite fails rather than defaulting to testing the
305 * Major changes in release 4.3.2
309 #18222: find -printf '%H %P' once again prints the right result if
310 more than one start point was given on the command line.
312 #17782: find -execdir now correctly puts the prefix "./" before the
313 expansion of "{}" rather than at the start of the argument it appears
314 in. Please note that if you use the -exec or -execdir actions with a
315 shell, then you may be vulnerable to shell code injection attacks, so
316 don't do that. It's not a security defect in find - you should not be
317 passing untrusted data (such as file names chosen by other people) to
320 #17490: find -regex generated a segfault in findutils-4.3.1, but this
321 is fixed in findutils-4.3.2.
323 #17477: find -printf '%' (that is, where the format has a trailing %)
324 now generates an error message.
326 #17372: The fts-based find executable (the default configuration uses
327 fts) is now much faster when -maxdepth is used on filesystems with
330 #15531: The -prune action now behaves correctly when applied to a file.
332 ** Functional changes
334 The slocate database format is now supported. Preliminary changes
335 intended to eventually allow setuid operation of locate have also been
336 made. For the moment, please don't install GNU locate as a
337 set-user-ID program (except for testing purposes; if you do so, please
338 make sure that untrusted users cannot execute the set-user-ID locate
341 Use of an slocate database which was built with a nonzero security
342 mode (at the moment, GNU updatedb will not do this) forces locate's
343 "-e" option to be turned on, which has an effect on the "-S" option
344 which is probably surprising for most users.
347 ** Documentation Fixes
349 The global effect of options (other than -daystart and -follow) is now
350 explained more clearly in the manual page. Savannah bug #15360.
353 * Major changes in release 4.3.1
357 Find now follows POSIX rules for determining where directories end and
358 expressions start. This means that "find \(1 \!2 \, \)" now searches
359 in the four named directories, rather than trying to parse an
360 expression. (Savannah bug #15235).
362 You now get a more helpful error message when you use command lines
363 which have missing expressions, such as
370 Savannah bug #15800: If find finds more subdirectories within a parent
371 directory than it previously expected to based on the link count of
372 the parent, the resulting error message now gives the correct
373 directory name (previously an error message was issued but it
374 specified the wrong directory).
376 Savannah bug #16738: "find .... -exec ... {} +" now works if you have
377 a large environment and many files must be passed to the -exec
378 action. The same problem affected the -execdir action, though since
379 the number of files in a given directory will normally be smaller, the
380 problem was worse for -exec.
382 Savannah bug #16579: Updatedb now works if it is running as a user
383 whose login shell is not actually a shell.
385 There have also been a number of documentation improvements (includng
386 Savannah bug #16269).
388 ** Functional changes
390 For find, debug output can now be enabled at runtime with the -D
391 option. This causes the printing of various sorts of information
392 about find's internal state and progress.
394 The find option -nowarn cannot itself produce a warning (this used to
395 happen with commands like "find . -name quux -nowarn -print").
397 ** Performance Enhancements
399 Find now has a rudimentary cost-based optimiser. It has an idea of
400 the basic cost of each test (i.e. that -name is very cheap while -size
401 is more expensive). It re-orders tests bearing in mind the cost of
402 each test and its likely success. Predicates with side effects (for
403 example -delete or -exec) are not reordered. The optimiser is not
404 yet enabled by default, but the new option -O controls the query
405 optimisation level. To see this in action, try
406 find -D opt -O3 . -type f -o -type c -o -size 555 -name Z
407 and compare the optimised query with:
408 find -D opt -O3 . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
410 find -D opt . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
412 Over time, as optimisations are proven to be robust and correct, they
413 will be moved to lower optimisation levels. Some optimisations have
414 always been performed by find (for example -name is always done early
419 Findutils 4.3.1 includes updated translations for the following
421 Vietnamese, Belarusian, Catalan, Danish, German, Greek, Esperanto,
422 Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Irish, Galician, Croatian, Hungarian,
423 Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Luganda, Malay, Dutch, Polish,
424 Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Kinyarwanda,
425 Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish, Chinese (simplified),
426 Chinese (traditional), Bulgarian
428 * Major changes in release 4.3.0
430 The 4.3.x release series are currently 'development' releases. Please
431 test it, but think carefully before installing it in a production
432 system. New features in findutils-4.3.x are under development; they
433 may change or go away.
435 All changes up to and including findutils-4.2.27 are included in this
436 release. In addition the following changes are new in this release:
438 ** Functional Changes
440 By default, find now uses the fts() function to search the file
441 system. The use of fts greatly increases find's ability to search
442 extremely deep directory hierarchites.
444 You can tell that the version of find you are using uses FTS, because
445 the output of "find --version" will include the word "FTS".
447 Currently two binaries for 'find' are built. The configure option
448 --without-fts can be used to select whether 'find' uses fts:
451 default configuration find oldfind
452 configure --with-fts find oldfind
453 configure --without-fts ftsfind find
455 New tests, -readable, -writable, -executable. These check that a file
456 can be read, written or executed respectively.
458 * Major changes in release 4.2.27
460 ** Warnings of Future Changes
462 The test -perm /000 currently matches no files, but for greater
463 consistency with -perm -000, this will be changed to match all files;
464 this change will probably be made in early 2006. Meanwhile, a warning
465 message is given if you do this.
469 If xargs is invoked with many short arguments on PPC systems running
470 the Linux kernel, we no longer get an "argument list too long" error
471 from the operating system.
473 Fixed a bug in the test suite which caused it to spuriously fail on
474 systems where ARG_MAX is different to the value used by the Linux
475 kernel on 32-bit x86-architecture systems.
477 On systems running the Linux kernel, "find -printf %F" no longer
478 produces the wrong answer for files on filesystems that have been
479 remounted elsewhere using "mount --bind". (Savannah bug #14921).
481 ** Documentation Changes
483 Following some extensive and detailed review comments from Aaron
484 Hawley, the material in the manual pages and the Texinfo manual are
487 The %M format specifier of "find -printf" is now documented, although
488 it has existed since release 4.2.5.
490 The 'find' manual page now correctly documents the fact that -regex
491 defaults to using Emacs-style regular expressions (though this can be
494 * Major changes in release 4.2.26
496 ** Public Service Announcements
498 I'd like to point out a second time that the interpretation of '-perm
499 +mode' has changed to be more POSIX-compliant. If you want the old
500 behaviour of the GNU extension you should use '-perm /mode'. See the
501 NEWS entry for findutils version 4.2.21 for details.
503 ** Functional Changes
505 The xargs command now supports a new option (--delimiter) which allows
506 input items to be separated by characters other than null and
507 whitespace. This resolves Savannah support request sr #102914.
509 Sometimes find needs to read the /etc/mtab file (or perform the
510 equivalent operation on systems not using /etc/mtab). If this
511 information is needed but not available, find now exits with an error
512 message non-zero status. If the information is not needed, find will
515 A new xargs option --delimiter allows the input delimiter to be
516 changed (previously \0 was the only choice unless you use the -L
517 option, which changes other semantics too).
521 If the environment size is too large to allow xargs to operate
522 normally, 'xargs --help' still works (now).
524 If the input to xargs is a large number of very short options (for
525 example, one character each), earlier versions of xargs would fail
526 with 'Argument list too long'. However, since this is precisely the
527 problem that xargs was invented to solve, this is a bug. Hence on
528 those systems we now correctly use a shorter command line. This
529 problem particularly affected 64-bit Linux systems because of the
530 larger size of pointers, although 32-bit Linux systems were also
531 affected (albeit for longer command lines). In theory the same
532 problem could affect 'find -exec {} +', but that's much less likely
533 (even so, the bug is fixed there too).
535 Bugfix for an unusual failure mode (Savannah bug #14842) where an
536 attempt to allocate more space for directory contents succeeds but is
537 incorrectly diagnosed as a failure. The likelihood of you
538 experiencing this depends on your architecture, operating system and
539 resource limits. This failure has been observed in a directory
540 containing 35396 entries.
542 ** Documentation Changes
544 The EXAMPLES section of the find manual page now correctly describes
545 the symbolic and octal modes for the -perm test.
547 The documentation and "--help" usage information for the -L, -l, -I
548 and -i options have been clarified (but the behaviour has not changed).
550 The documentation now explains more clearly what happens when you use
553 * Major changes in release 4.2.25
557 find -perm /440 (which should succeed if a file is readable by its
558 owner or group) now works. Previously there was a bug which caused
559 this to be treated as "find -perm 440".
561 Some files in the xargs test suite have been renamed to avoid problems
562 on operating systems whoch cannot distinguish filenames on the basis
563 of upper/lower case distinctions.
565 The software now builds on Cygwin, including the generated file
568 Findutils should now build once again on systems supporting AFS, but
569 this support has not recently been fully tested. Findutils should
570 also (once again) build on Cygwin.
574 The test suite for find is now much more extensive.
576 * Major changes in release 4.2.24
578 ** Documentation Changes
580 The manual now includes a "Worked Examples" section which talks about
581 the various ways in which findutils can be used to perform common
582 tasks, and why some of these alternatives are better than others.
584 The -I option of xargs (which is required by the POSIX standard) is
587 We now document the fact that find ensures that commands run by -ok
588 and -okdir don't steal find's input. Find does this by redirecting
589 the command's standard input from stdin.
591 Many documentation readability enhancements and proofreading fixes
592 were contributed by Aaron Hawley.
594 ** Functional Changes
596 *** Functional changes in locate
598 The "--regex" option of locate now assumes the regular expression to
599 be in the same syntax as is used in GNU Emacs, though this can be
600 changed with the new option --regextype. This is a change from the
601 existing behaviour (which was to use POSIX Basic Regular Expressions).
602 Since this feature is releatively new anyway, I though it was more
603 useful to have compatibility between regular expression handling in
604 find and locate than to maintain the short-lived previous behaviour of
607 The locate program now also supports a "--regextype" long option which
608 controls which regular expression syntax is understood by locate.
609 This is a long option and has no single-letter 'short option'
612 *** Functional changes in find
614 The regular expression syntax understood by "find" can be changed with
615 the -regextype option; this option is positional, meaning that you can
616 have several tests, each using a distinct syntax (this is not
617 recommended practice however).
619 The default regular expression syntax is substantially the same as
620 that recognised by GNU Emacs, except for the fact that "." will match
623 The leaf optimisation can be disabled with the configure option
624 "--disable-leaf-optimisation", which is equivalent to specifying
625 "-noleaf" on all find command lines. This is useful for systems
626 having filesystems which do not provide traditional Unix behaviour for
627 the link count on directories (for example Cygwin and the Solaris 9
628 HSFS implementation).
632 *** Bug Fixes for find
634 The -iregex test now works once again on systems that lack
635 re_search() (that is, systems on which findutils needs to use the
636 gnulib version of this function).
638 find -regex now once again uses GNU Emacs-compatible regular
641 If invoked with stderr closed, the -fprint and -fprintf actions now no
642 longer cause error messages to be sent into the output file.
644 If the link count of a directory is less that two, the leaf
645 optimisation is now disabled for that directory. This should allow
646 searching of non-Unix filesystems to be more reliable on systems that
647 don't take the trouble to make their filesystems look like traditional
648 Unix filesystems. Some filesystems don't even take the trouble to
649 have a link count of less than two and for these, -noleaf is still
650 required unless --disable-leaf-optimisation was used at configure time.
652 The "%Y" directive for the -printf action now no longer changes find's
653 idea of the mode of the file, so this means among other things that
654 "-printf %Y %y" now works properly. This is Savannah bug #13973.
656 * Major changes in release 4.2.23
658 ** Documentation Changes
660 The -L and -I options of xargs are currently incompatible (but should
663 Improved the documentation for -execdir and -okdir.
665 ** Functional Changes to updatedb
667 File names ending in "/" which are specified as an argument to
668 --prunepaths (or in $PRUNEPATHS) don't work, so we now issue an error
669 message if the user tries to do that. The obvious exception of course
670 is "/" which does work and is not rejected.
673 * Major changes in release 4.2.22
677 If a directory entry searched with "find -L" is a symbolic link to
678 ".", we no longer loop indefinitely. This problem affected find
679 versions 4.2.19, 4.2.20 and 4.2.21. This problem allows users to make
680 "find" loop indefinitely. This is in effect a denial of service and
681 could be used to prevent updates to the locate database or to defeat
682 file security checks based on find. However, it should be noted that
683 you should not use "find -L" in security-sensitive scenarios.
687 None in this release.
689 ** Functional Changes to locate
691 A locate database can now be supplied on stdin, using '-' as a element
692 of the database-path. If more than one database-path element is '-',
693 later instances are ignored.
695 A new option to locate, '--all' ('-A') causes matches to be limited to
696 entries which match all given patterns, not entries which match
697 one or more patterns.
699 ** Documentation Changes
701 Some typos in the manual pages have been fixed. Various parts of the
702 manual now point out that it is good practice to quote the argument of
703 "-name". The manpage now has a "NON-BUGS" section which explains some
704 symptoms that look like bugs but aren't. The explanations of the "%k"
705 and "%b" directives to "find -printf" have been imrpoved.
708 * Major changes in release 4.2.21
709 ** Functional Changes to find
711 The GNU extension "find ... -perm +MODE" has been withdrawn because it
712 is incompatible with POSIX in obscure cases like "find ... -perm ++r".
713 Use the new syntax "find ... -perm /MODE" instead. Old usages will
714 still continue to work, so long as they don't conflict with POSIX.
716 If the output is going to a terminal, the -print, -fprint, -printf and
717 -fprintf actions now quote "unusual" characters to prevent unwanted
718 effects on the terminal. See "Unusual Characters in File Names" for
719 further details. There is no change to the behaviour when the output
720 is not going to a terminal. The locate program does the same thing,
721 unless the -0 option is in effect (in which case the filenames are
724 ** Functional Changes to locate
726 The locate command will now read each locate database at most once.
727 This means that if you are using multiple databases and are searching
728 for more than one name, the results will now be printed in a different
729 order (and if you specified a small limit with --limit, you may get a
730 different set of results).
732 A new option '--print' for locate causes it to print the matching
733 results even if the '--count' or '--statistics' option is in effect.
736 find /blah/blah/blah -depth -empty now works once again.
738 The -regex and -iregex tests of find now correctly accept POSIX Basic
739 Regular Expressions. (Savannah bug #12999)
741 The updatedb program now works on systems where "su" does not support
742 the "-s" option, for example Solaris.
744 * Major changes in release 4.2.20
745 ** Internationalization and Localization
746 Updated Vietnamese and Dutch translations.
749 Minor bugfix affecting only those who compile from the CVS repository,
750 as opposed to those who compile from the source releases.
752 * Major changes in release 4.2.19
755 find should now no longer hang on systems which lack the O_NOFOLLOW
756 flag to open(2) and which are clients of an unresponsive NFS server
757 (Savannah bug #12044).
759 We now avoid inappropriately failing for "find -L foo" or "find -H
760 foo" if foo is a symbolic link (Savannah bug #12181). Previously we
761 used to fail with the error message "Too many levels of symbolic
764 "find . -false -exec foo {} +" no longer runs an extra instance of foo
765 when find exits (Savannah bug #12230).
767 If the chdir() safety check fails but we can no longer get back to
768 where we started, exit with an explanatory (fatal) error message.
769 This does not happen on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD because the safety check
770 is not needed (the security problem the safety check protects against
771 is prevented in a cleaner way on those systems).
773 "make distclean" no longer deletes regex.c (which "make all" needs).
775 ** Functionality Changes
776 "find -printf "%h\n" will now print "." for files in the current directory.
777 Previously it printed nothing (but there was a bug in the %h
778 implementation anyway). This fixes Savannah bug #12085.
780 Should now build (again) on non-C99-compliant systems.
782 ** Documentation enhancements
783 Fixed some typos and clarified wording in "Working with automounters".
785 ** Internationalization and Localization
786 New Vietnamese message translation.
788 * Major changes in release 4.2.18
790 *** "find -depth" was missing out non-leaf directories when they contain
791 non-directories. This affected findutils releases 4.2.15,
792 4.2.16 and 4.2.17, but the bug is now fixed.
793 *** Find no longer hangs on systems which are clients of unresponsive
795 ** Documentation improvements
796 *** Improvements and corrections to the find.1 manpage, including corrections to the descriptions of -H and -L.
798 * Major changes in release 4.2.17
800 *** bug #11861 undefined symbol "basename" on IRIX 5.3
801 *** bug #11865 xargs -i regression (as compared to findutils-4.2.12)
802 *** bug #11866 Typo in pred_okdir renders it useless (affecting 4.2.16 only)
803 *** patch #3723 fix recent process_top_path change (for -execdir on /)
804 *** Fixing bug #11866 and applying patch #3723 made -execdir work much better.
805 *** find bar/baz/ugh now works again if baz is a symbolic link (broken
808 * Major changes in release 4.2.16
809 ** Functionality Changes
810 *** Updated the message catalogues for the translated messages.
811 *** The subfs filesystem is now treated the same as the autofs
813 *** New translations: Belarusian, Catalan, Greek, Esperanto,
814 Finnish, Irish, Croatian, Hungarian, Japanese, Luganda,
815 Malay, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian, Chinese (simplified).
818 *** The -execdir action now works correctly for files named on the
821 * Major changes in release 4.2.15
822 ** Functionality Changes
823 *** locate now supports matching regular expression (--regex).
824 *** --enable-d_type-optimization (introduced in findutils 4.2.13) is now turned on by default.
826 * Major changes in release 4.2.14
827 ** Functionality Changes
828 *** New options -L, -P, -H for locate. The work in the same was as the same options for find.
830 *** Don't include the "findutils/find/testsuite/find.gnu" subdirectory in the
831 distributed tar file more than once.
832 *** Should now build on Solaris once again.
833 *** -xtype and -printf %Y now work correctly for symbolic links once again
834 ** Documentation improvements
835 *** All options for "locate" are now documented
837 * Major changes in release 4.2.13
838 ** Performance Enhancements
839 *** On Linux and some other systems, a large performance improvement,
840 because we can eliminate many of the calls to lstat() (in extreme
841 cases, 99% of them). Limited testing shows a 2x speedup on NFS
842 filesystems. Other systems which can make use of this enhancement
843 include Mac OS X and *BSD.
845 * Major changes in release 4.2.12
846 ** Functionality Changes
847 *** find is now POSIX-compliant, as far as I know.
848 *** -exec ... {} + now works.
849 *** New actions -execdir and -okdir which are like -exec and -ok but more secure.
850 *** "locate -w" is now a synonym for "locate --wholepath".
851 *** An empty path entry in the locate database path (for example "::" in
852 $LOCATE_PATH or in the argument to "locate -d") is taken to mean
853 the default database, whose name is hard-coded in locate.
855 *** If find or xargs cannot write to stdout, for example because
856 output is redirected to a file and the disk is full, the
857 relevant program will return a non-zero exit status.
859 * Major changes in release 4.2.11
861 *** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW.
862 *** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a.
863 ** Functionality Changes
864 *** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line,
865 or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce
866 a more helpful error message.
867 *** locate -b is now a synonym for locate --basename
868 *** locate now supports a --statistics (or -S) option, which prints some
869 statistics about the locate databases.
870 *** Implemented the -samefile option.
871 ** Documentation improvements
872 *** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations".
873 *** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to Stepan Kasal)
875 *** locate's options -i and -w now work with the -e option (previously a bug
878 * Major changes in release 4.2.10
880 *** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly
881 also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
884 * Major changes in release 4.2.9
885 ** Functionality Changes
886 *** xargs no longer treats a line containing only an underscore as a logical end-of-file. To obtain the behaviour that was previously the default, use "-E_".
887 *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms
888 for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
891 *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.
892 Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
893 invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
895 *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
896 *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune
897 is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
898 ** Documentation improvements
899 *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime
900 and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
902 * Major changes in release 4.2.8
903 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
904 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
907 * Major changes in release 4.2.7
908 ** Functionality Changes
909 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
910 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
911 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
912 ** Documentation improvements
913 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
914 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
915 are not are explained in this chapter.
917 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
919 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
921 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
922 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
924 * Major changes in release 4.2.6
926 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
927 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
928 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
929 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
932 * Major changes in release 4.2.5
933 ** Functionality Changes
934 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
935 find will follow symbolic links.
936 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
938 ** Documentation improvements
939 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
941 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
942 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
943 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
944 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
945 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
946 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
947 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
949 * Major changes in release 4.2.4
950 ** Functionality Changes
951 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
952 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
954 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
955 doesn't support that much).
956 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
957 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
958 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
959 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
960 by the use of the -nowarn option.
961 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
962 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
963 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
964 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
966 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
967 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
968 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
969 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
970 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
971 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
972 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
973 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
974 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
975 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
976 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
978 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
979 systems that have non-writable string constants.
980 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
981 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
982 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
984 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
986 * Major changes in release 4.2.3
987 ** Functionality Changes
988 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
989 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
990 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
991 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
992 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
993 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
994 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
995 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
996 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
997 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
998 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
999 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
1000 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
1001 directory we've just returned out of).
1003 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
1005 * Major changes in release 4.2.2
1006 ** Documentation improvements
1007 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
1009 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
1010 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
1011 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
1013 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
1014 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
1016 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
1017 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
1018 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
1019 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
1021 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
1023 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
1024 requires it, as explained at
1025 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
1027 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
1029 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
1030 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
1031 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
1032 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
1033 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
1035 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
1037 * Major changes in release 4.2.0
1038 ** Functionality Changes
1039 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
1040 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
1041 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
1042 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
1043 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
1044 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
1045 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
1046 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
1047 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
1048 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
1049 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
1050 find stats the file. There is also an option
1051 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
1052 ** Documentation improvements
1053 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
1054 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
1055 The find manual page also now includes a section
1056 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
1057 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
1058 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
1059 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
1060 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
1061 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
1063 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
1065 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
1066 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
1067 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
1068 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
1069 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
1070 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
1071 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
1072 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
1073 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
1074 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
1075 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
1076 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
1077 database if it fails.
1078 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
1079 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
1081 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
1082 This was broken in 4.1.20.
1084 * Major changes in release 4.1.20:
1085 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
1086 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
1088 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
1089 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
1090 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
1091 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
1093 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
1095 * Major changes in release 4.1.7:
1096 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
1097 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
1099 * Major changes in release 4.1.6:
1100 correct bug in prune.
1101 added --ignore-case option for locate
1103 * Major changes in release 4.1.5:
1104 Add support for large files
1106 * Major changes in release 4.1.4:
1107 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
1109 * Major changes in release 4.1.3:
1110 added internationalization and localization.
1112 * Major changes in release 4.1.1:
1113 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
1114 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
1116 * Major changes in release 4.1:
1118 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
1119 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
1120 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
1121 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
1123 * Major changes in release 4.0:
1127 *** Man page for updatedb.
1128 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
1131 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
1132 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
1133 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
1134 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
1135 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
1136 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
1139 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
1140 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
1141 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
1142 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
1143 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
1144 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
1146 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
1149 *** Takes command-line options.
1152 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
1153 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
1154 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
1156 * Major changes in release 3.8:
1158 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
1159 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
1160 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
1162 * Major changes in release 3.7:
1164 ** locate can search multiple databases
1165 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
1166 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
1169 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
1171 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
1172 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
1173 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
1174 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
1175 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf