1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
2 * Major changes in release 4.2.25-CVS
6 find -perm /440 (which should succeed if a file is readable by its
7 owner or group) now works. Previously there was a bug which
8 caused this to be treated as "find -perm 440".
12 The test suite for find is now much more extensive.
14 * Major changes in release 4.2.24
16 ** Documentation Changes
18 The manual now includes a "Worked Examples" section which talks about
19 the various ways in which findutils can be used to perform common
20 tasks, and why some of these alternatives are better than others.
22 The -I option of xargs (which is required by the POSIX standard) is
25 We now document the fact that find ensures that commands run by -ok
26 and -okdir don't steal find's input. Find does this by redirecting
27 the command's standard input from stdin.
29 Many documentation readability enhancements and proofreading fixes
30 were contributed by Aaron Hawley.
34 *** Functional changes in locate
36 The "--regex" option of locate now assumes the regular expression to
37 be in the same syntax as is used in GNU Emacs, though this can be
38 changed with the new option --regextype. This is a change from the
39 existing behaviour (which was to use POSIX Basic Regular Expressions).
40 Since this featrue is releatively new anyway, I though it was more
41 useful to have compatibility between regular expression handling in
42 find and locate than to maintain the short-lived previous behaviour of
45 The locate program now also supports a "--regextype" long option which
46 controls which regular expression syntax is understood by locate.
47 This is a long option and has no single-letter 'short option'
50 *** Functional changes in find
52 The regular expression syntax understood by "find" can be changed with
53 the -regextype option; this option is positional, meaning that you can
54 have several tests, each using a distinct syntax (this is not
55 recommended practice however).
57 The default regular expression syntax is substantially the same as
58 that recognised by GNU Emacs, except for the fact that "." will match
61 The leaf optimisation can be disabled with the configure option
62 "--disable-leaf-optimisation", which is equivalent to specifying
63 "-noleaf" on all find command lines. This is useful for systems
64 having filesystems which do not provide traditional Unix behaviour for
65 the link cound on directories (for example Cygwin and the Solaris 9
70 *** Bug Fixes for find
72 The -iregex test now works once again on systems that lack
73 re_search() (that is, systems on which findutils needs to use the
74 gnulib version of this function).
76 find -regex now once again uses GNU Emacs-compatible regular
79 If invoked with stderr closed, the -fprint and -fprintf actions now no
80 longer cause error messages to be sent into the output file.
82 If the link count of a directory is less that two, the leaf
83 optimisation is now disabled for that directory. This should allow
84 searching of non-Unix filesystems to be more reliable on systems that
85 don't take the trouble to make their filesystems look like traditional
86 Unix filesystems. Some filesystems don't even take the trouble to
87 have a link count of less than two and for these, -noleaf is still
88 required unless --disable-leaf-optimisation was used at configure time.
90 The "%Y" directive for the -orintf action now no longer changes find's
91 idea of the mode of the file, so this means among other things that
92 "-printf %Y %y" now works properly. This is Savannah bug #13973.
94 * Major changes in release 4.2.23
96 ** Documentation Changes
98 The -L and -I options of xargs are currently incompatible (but should
101 Improved the documentation for -execdir and -okdir.
103 ** Functional Changes to updatedb
105 File names ending in "/" which are specified as an argument to
106 --prunepaths (or in $PRUNEPATHS) don't work, so we now issue an error
107 message if the user tries to do that. The obvious exception of course
108 is "/" which does work and is not rejected.
111 * Major changes in release 4.2.22
115 If a directory entry searched with "find -L" is a symbolic link to
116 ".", we no longer loop indefinitely. This problem affected find
117 versions 4.2.19, 4.2.20 and 4.2.21. This problem allows users to make
118 "find" loop indefinitely. This is in effect a denial of service and
119 could be used to prevent updates to the locate database or to defeat
120 file security checks based on find. However, it should be noted that
121 you should not use "find -L" in security-sensitive scenarios.
125 None in this release.
127 ** Functional Changes to locate
129 A locate database can now be supplied on stdin, using '-' as a element
130 of the database-path. If more than one database-path element is '-',
131 later instances are ignored.
133 A new option to locate, '--all' ('-A') causes matches to be limited to
134 entries which match all given patterns, not entries which match
135 one or more patterns.
137 ** Documentation Changes
139 Some typos in the manual pages have been fixed. Various parts of the
140 manual now point out that it is good practice to quote the argument of
141 "-name". The manpage now has a "NON-BUGS" section which explains some
142 symptoms that look like bugs but aren't. The explanations of the "%k"
143 and "%b" directives to "find -printf" have been imrpoved.
146 * Major changes in release 4.2.21
147 ** Functional Changes to find
149 The GNU extension "find ... -perm +MODE" has been withdrawn because it
150 is incompatible with POSIX in obscure cases like "find ... -perm ++r".
151 Use the new syntax "find ... -perm /MODE" instead. Old usages will
152 still continue to work, so long as they don't conflict with POSIX.
154 If the output is going to a terminal, the -print, -fprint, -printf and
155 -fprintf actions now quote "unusual" characters to prevent unwanted
156 effects on the terminal. See "Unusual Characters in File Names" for
157 further details. There is no change to the behaviour when the output
158 is not going to a terminal. The locate program does the same thing,
159 unless the -0 option is in effect (in which case the filenames are
162 ** Functional Changes to locate
164 The locate command will now read each locate database at most once.
165 This means that if you are using multiple databases and are searching
166 for more than one name, the results will now be printed in a different
167 order (and if you specified a small limit with --limit, you may get a
168 different set of results).
170 A new option '--print' for locate causes it to print the matching
171 results even if the '--count' or '--statistics' option is in effect.
174 find /blah/blah/blah -depth -empty now works once again.
176 The -regex and -iregex tests of find now correctly accept POSIX Basic
177 Regular Expressions. (Savannah bug #12999)
179 The updatedb program now works on systems where "su" does not support
180 the "-s" option, for example Solaris.
182 * Major changes in release 4.2.20
183 ** Internationalization and Localization
184 Updated Vietnamese and Dutch translations.
187 Minor bugfix affecting only those who compile from the CVS repository,
188 as opposed to those who compile from the source releases.
190 * Major changes in release 4.2.19
193 find should now no longer hang on systems which lack the O_NOFOLLOW
194 flag to open(2) and which are clients of an unresponsive NFS server
195 (Savannah bug #12044).
197 We now avoid inappropriately failing for "find -L foo" or "find -H
198 foo" if foo is a symbolic link (Savannah bug #12181). Previously we
199 used to fail with the error message "Too many levels of symbolic
202 "find . -false -exec foo {} +" no longer runs an extra instance of foo
203 when find exits (Savannah bug #12230).
205 If the chdir() safety check fails but we can no longer get back to
206 where we started, exit with an explanatory (fatal) error message.
207 This does not happen on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD because the safety check
208 is not needed (the security problem the safety check protects against
209 is prevented in a cleaner way on those systems).
211 "make distclean" no longer deletes regex.c (which "make all" needs).
213 ** Functionality Changes
214 "find -printf "%h\n" will now print "." for files in the current directory.
215 Previously it printed nothing (but there was a bug in the %h
216 implementation anyway). This fixes Savannah bug #12085.
218 Should now build (again) on non-C99-compliant systems.
220 ** Documentation enhancements
221 Fixed some typos and clarified wording in "Working with automounters".
223 ** Internationalization and Localization
224 New Vietnamese message translation.
226 * Major changes in release 4.2.18
228 *** "find -depth" was missing out non-leaf directories when they contain
229 non-directories. This affected findutils releases 4.2.15,
230 4.2.16 and 4.2.17, but the bug is now fixed.
231 *** Find no longer hangs on systems which are clients of unresponsive
233 ** Documentation improvements
234 *** Improvements and corrections to the find.1 manpage, including corrections to the descriptions of -H and -L.
236 * Major changes in release 4.2.17
238 *** bug #11861 undefined symbol "basename" on IRIX 5.3
239 *** bug #11865 xargs -i regression (as compared to findutils-4.2.12)
240 *** bug #11866 Typo in pred_okdir renders it useless (affecting 4.2.16 only)
241 *** patch #3723 fix recent process_top_path change (for -execdir on /)
242 *** Fixing bug #11866 and applying patch #3723 made -execdir work much better.
243 *** find bar/baz/ugh now works again if baz is a symbolic link (broken
246 * Major changes in release 4.2.16
247 ** Functionality Changes
248 *** Updated the message catalogues for the translated messages.
249 *** The subfs filesystem is now treated the same as the autofs
251 *** New translations: Belarusian, Catalan, Greek, Esperanto,
252 Finnish, Irish, Croatian, Hungarian, Japanese, Luganda,
253 Malay, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian, Chinese (simplified).
256 *** The -execdir action now works correctly for files named on the
259 * Major changes in release 4.2.15
260 ** Functionality Changes
261 *** locate now supports matching regular expression (--regex).
262 *** --enable-d_type-optimization (introduced in findutils 4.2.13) is now turned on by default.
264 * Major changes in release 4.2.14
265 ** Functionality Changes
266 *** New options -L, -P, -H for locate. The work in the same was as the same options for find.
268 *** Don't include the "findutils/find/testsuite/find.gnu" subdirectory in the
269 distributed tar file more than once.
270 *** Should now build on Solaris once again.
271 *** -xtype and -printf %Y now work correctly for symbolic links once again
272 ** Documentation improvements
273 *** All options for "locate" are now documented
275 * Major changes in release 4.2.13
276 ** Performance Enhancements
277 *** On Linux and some other systems, a large performance improvement,
278 because we can eliminate many of the calls to lstat() (in extreme
279 cases, 99% of them). Limited testing shows a 2x speedup on NFS
280 filesystems. Other systems which can make use of this enhancement
281 include Mac OS X and *BSD.
283 * Major changes in release 4.2.12
284 ** Functionality Changes
285 *** find is now POSIX-compliant, as far as I know.
286 *** -exec ... {} + now works.
287 *** New actions -execdir and -okdir which are like -exec and -ok but more secure.
288 *** "locate -w" is now a synonym for "locate --wholepath".
289 *** An empty path entry in the locate database path (for example "::" in
290 $LOCATE_PATH or in the argument to "locate -d") is taken to mean
291 the default database, whose name is hard-coded in locate.
293 *** If find or xargs cannot write to stdout, for example because
294 output is redirected to a file and the disk is full, the
295 relevant program will return a non-zero exit status.
297 * Major changes in release 4.2.11
299 *** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW.
300 *** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a.
301 ** Functionality Changes
302 *** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line,
303 or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce
304 a more helpful error message.
305 *** locate -b is now a synonym for locate --basename
306 *** locate now supports a --statistics (or -S) option, which prints some
307 statistics about the locate databases.
308 *** Implemented the -samefile option.
309 ** Documentation improvements
310 *** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations".
311 *** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to Stepan Kasal)
313 *** locate's options -i and -w now work with the -e option (previously a bug
316 * Major changes in release 4.2.10
318 *** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly
319 also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
322 * Major changes in release 4.2.9
323 ** Functionality Changes
324 *** 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_".
325 *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms
326 for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
329 *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.
330 Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
331 invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
333 *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
334 *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune
335 is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
336 ** Documentation improvements
337 *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime
338 and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
340 * Major changes in release 4.2.8
341 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
342 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
345 * Major changes in release 4.2.7
346 ** Functionality Changes
347 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
348 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
349 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
350 ** Documentation improvements
351 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
352 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
353 are not are explained in this chapter.
355 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
357 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
359 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
360 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
362 * Major changes in release 4.2.6
364 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
365 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
366 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
367 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
370 * Major changes in release 4.2.5
371 ** Functionality Changes
372 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
373 find will follow symbolic links.
374 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
376 ** Documentation improvements
377 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
379 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
380 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
381 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
382 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
383 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
384 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
385 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
387 * Major changes in release 4.2.4
388 ** Functionality Changes
389 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
390 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
392 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
393 doesn't support that much).
394 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
395 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
396 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
397 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
398 by the use of the -nowarn option.
399 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
400 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
401 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
402 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
404 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
405 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
406 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
407 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
408 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
409 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
410 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
411 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
412 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
413 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
414 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
416 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
417 systems that have non-writable string constants.
418 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
419 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
420 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
422 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
424 * Major changes in release 4.2.3
425 ** Functionality Changes
426 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
427 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
428 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
429 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
430 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
431 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
432 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
433 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
434 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
435 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
436 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
437 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
438 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
439 directory we've just returned out of).
441 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
443 * Major changes in release 4.2.2
444 ** Documentation improvements
445 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
447 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
448 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
449 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
451 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
452 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
454 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
455 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
456 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
457 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
459 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
461 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
462 requires it, as explained at
463 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
465 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
467 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
468 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
469 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
470 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
471 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
473 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
475 * Major changes in release 4.2.0
476 ** Functionality Changes
477 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
478 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
479 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
480 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
481 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
482 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
483 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
484 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
485 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
486 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
487 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
488 find stats the file. There is also an option
489 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
490 ** Documentation improvements
491 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
492 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
493 The find manual page also now includes a section
494 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
495 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
496 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
497 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
498 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
499 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
501 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
503 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
504 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
505 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
506 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
507 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
508 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
509 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
510 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
511 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
512 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
513 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
514 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
515 database if it fails.
516 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
517 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
519 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
520 This was broken in 4.1.20.
522 * Major changes in release 4.1.20:
523 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
524 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
526 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
527 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
528 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
529 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
531 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
533 * Major changes in release 4.1.7:
534 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
535 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
537 * Major changes in release 4.1.6:
538 correct bug in prune.
539 added --ignore-case option for locate
541 * Major changes in release 4.1.5:
542 Add support for large files
544 * Major changes in release 4.1.4:
545 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
547 * Major changes in release 4.1.3:
548 added internationalization and localization.
550 * Major changes in release 4.1.1:
551 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
552 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
554 * Major changes in release 4.1:
556 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
557 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
558 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
559 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
561 * Major changes in release 4.0:
565 *** Man page for updatedb.
566 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
569 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
570 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
571 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
572 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
573 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
574 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
577 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
578 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
579 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
580 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
581 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
582 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
584 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
587 *** Takes command-line options.
590 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
591 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
592 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
594 * Major changes in release 3.8:
596 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
597 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
598 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
600 * Major changes in release 3.7:
602 ** locate can search multiple databases
603 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
604 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
607 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
609 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
610 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
611 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
612 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
613 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf