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1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
2 * Major changes in release 4.2.8-CVS
3 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
4 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
5 findutils-4.2.8.
7 * Major changes in release 4.2.7
8 ** Functionality Changes
9 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
10 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
11 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
12 ** Documentation improvements
13 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
14 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
15 are not are explained in this chapter.
16 ** Bug Fixes
17 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
18 have it.
19 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
20 on Solaris).
21 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
22 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
24 * Major changes in release 4.2.6
25 ** Bug Fixes
26 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
27 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
28 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
29 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
30 #9043.
32 * Major changes in release 4.2.5
33 ** Functionality Changes
34 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
35 find will follow symbolic links.
36 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
37 it is the default).
38 ** Documentation improvements
39 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
40 ** Bug Fixes
41 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
42 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
43 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
44 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
45 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
46 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
47 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
49 * Major changes in release 4.2.4
50 ** Functionality Changes
51 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
52 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
53 locate).
54 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
55 doesn't support that much).
56 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
57 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
58 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
59 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
60 by the use of the -nowarn option.
61 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
62 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
63 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
64 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
65 grep -c).
66 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
67 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
68 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
69 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
70 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
71 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
72 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
73 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
74 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
75 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
76 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
77 ** Bug Fixes
78 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
79 systems that have non-writable string constants.
80 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
81 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
82 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
83 value).
84 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
86 * Major changes in release 4.2.3
87 ** Functionality Changes
88 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
89 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
90 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
91 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
92 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
93 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
94 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
95 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
96 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
97 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
98 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
99 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
100 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
101 directory we've just returned out of).
102 ** Other Changes
103 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
105 * Major changes in release 4.2.2
106 ** Documentation improvements
107 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
108 ** Bug Fixes
109 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
110 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
111 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
112 ** Other Changes
113 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
114 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
115 now.
116 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
117 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
118 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
119 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
121 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
122 ** Bug Fixes
123 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
124 requires it, as explained at
125 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
127 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
128 ** Bug Fixes
129 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
130 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
131 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
132 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
133 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
134 ** Other Changes
135 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
137 * Major changes in release 4.2.0
138 ** Functionality Changes
139 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
140 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
141 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
142 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
143 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
144 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
145 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
146 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
147 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
148 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
149 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
150 find stats the file. There is also an option
151 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
152 ** Documentation improvements
153 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
154 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
155 The find manual page also now includes a section
156 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
157 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
158 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
159 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
160 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
161 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
162 has been improved.
163 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
164 ** Bug Fixes
165 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
166 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
167 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
168 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
169 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
170 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
171 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
172 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
173 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
174 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
175 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
176 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
177 database if it fails.
178 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
179 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
180 locate database.
181 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
182 This was broken in 4.1.20.
184 * Major changes in release 4.1.20:
185 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
186 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
187 a gap just in case.
188 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
189 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
190 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
191 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
192 README-CVS).
193 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
195 * Major changes in release 4.1.7:
196 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
197 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
199 * Major changes in release 4.1.6:
200 correct bug in prune.
201 added --ignore-case option for locate
203 * Major changes in release 4.1.5:
204 Add support for large files
206 * Major changes in release 4.1.4:
207 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
209 * Major changes in release 4.1.3:
210 added internationalization and localization.
212 * Major changes in release 4.1.1:
213 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
214 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
216 * Major changes in release 4.1:
218 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
219 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
220 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
221 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
222 \f
223 * Major changes in release 4.0:
225 ** Documentation:
226 *** Texinfo manual.
227 *** Man page for updatedb.
228 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
230 ** find:
231 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
232 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
233 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
234 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
235 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
236 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
238 ** locate:
239 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
240 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
241 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
242 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
243 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
244 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
245 some systems.
246 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
248 ** updatedb:
249 *** Takes command-line options.
251 ** xargs:
252 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
253 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
254 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
255 \f
256 * Major changes in release 3.8:
258 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
259 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
260 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
261 \f
262 * Major changes in release 3.7:
264 ** locate can search multiple databases
265 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
266 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
268 --//--
269 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
271 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
272 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
273 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
274 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
275 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf