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1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
2 * Major changes in release 4.2.6
3 ** Bug Fixes
4 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
5 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
6 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
7 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998, #9043.
9 * Major changes in release 4.2.5
10 ** Functionality Changes
11 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
12 find will follow symbolic links.
13 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
14 it is the default).
15 ** Documentation improvements
16 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
17 ** Bug Fixes
18 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
19 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
20 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
21 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
22 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
23 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
24 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
26 * Major changes in release 4.2.4
27 ** Functionality Changes
28 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
29 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
30 locate).
31 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
32 doesn't support that much).
33 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
34 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
35 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
36 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
37 by the use of the -nowarn option.
38 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
39 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
40 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
41 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
42 grep -c).
43 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
44 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
45 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
46 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
47 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
48 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
49 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
50 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
51 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
52 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
53 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
54 ** Bug Fixes
55 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
56 systems that have non-writable string constants.
57 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
58 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
59 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
60 value).
61 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
63 * Major changes in release 4.2.3
64 ** Functionality Changes
65 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
66 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
67 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
68 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
69 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
70 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
71 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
72 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
73 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
74 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
75 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
76 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
77 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
78 directory we've just returned out of).
79 ** Other Changes
80 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
82 * Major changes in release 4.2.2
83 ** Documentation improvements
84 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
85 ** Bug Fixes
86 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
87 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
88 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
89 ** Other Changes
90 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
91 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
92 now.
93 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
94 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
95 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
96 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
98 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
99 ** Bug Fixes
100 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
101 requires it, as explained at
102 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
104 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
105 ** Bug Fixes
106 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
107 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
108 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
109 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
110 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
111 ** Other Changes
112 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
114 * Major changes in release 4.2.0
115 ** Functionality Changes
116 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
117 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
118 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
119 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
120 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
121 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
122 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
123 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
124 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
125 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
126 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
127 find stats the file. There is also an option
128 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
129 ** Documentation improvements
130 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
131 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
132 The find manual page also now includes a section
133 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
134 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
135 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
136 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
137 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
138 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
139 has been improved.
140 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
141 ** Bug Fixes
142 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
143 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
144 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
145 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
146 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
147 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
148 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
149 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
150 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
151 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
152 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
153 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
154 database if it fails.
155 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
156 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
157 locate database.
158 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
159 This was broken in 4.1.20.
161 * Major changes in release 4.1.20:
162 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
163 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
164 a gap just in case.
165 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
166 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
167 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
168 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
169 README-CVS).
170 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
172 * Major changes in release 4.1.7:
173 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
174 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
176 * Major changes in release 4.1.6:
177 correct bug in prune.
178 added --ignore-case option for locate
180 * Major changes in release 4.1.5:
181 Add support for large files
183 * Major changes in release 4.1.4:
184 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
186 * Major changes in release 4.1.3:
187 added internationalization and localization.
189 * Major changes in release 4.1.1:
190 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
191 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
193 * Major changes in release 4.1:
195 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
196 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
197 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
198 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
199 \f
200 * Major changes in release 4.0:
202 ** Documentation:
203 *** Texinfo manual.
204 *** Man page for updatedb.
205 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
207 ** find:
208 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
209 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
210 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
211 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
212 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
213 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
215 ** locate:
216 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
217 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
218 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
219 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
220 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
221 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
222 some systems.
223 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
225 ** updatedb:
226 *** Takes command-line options.
228 ** xargs:
229 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
230 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
231 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
232 \f
233 * Major changes in release 3.8:
235 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
236 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
237 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
238 \f
239 * Major changes in release 3.7:
241 ** locate can search multiple databases
242 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
243 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
245 --//--
246 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
248 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
249 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
250 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
251 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
252 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf