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1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
2 * Major changes in release 4.3.1-CVS
4 * Major changes in release 4.3.0
6 The 4.3.x release series are currently 'development' releases. Please
7 test it, but think carefully before installing it in a production
8 system. New features in findutils-4.3.x are under development; they
9 may change or go away.
11 All changes up to and including findutils-4.2.27 are included in this
12 release. In addition the following changes are new in this release:
14 ** Functional Changes
16 By default, find now uses the fts() function to search the file
17 system. The use of fts greatly increases find's ability to search
18 extremely deep directory hierarchites.
20 You can tell that the version of find you are using uses FTS, because
21 the output of "find --version" will include the word "FTS".
23 Currently two binaries for 'find' are built. The configure option
24 --without-fts can be used to select whether 'find' uses fts:
26 With fts Without fts
27 default configuration find oldfind
28 configure --with-fts find oldfind
29 configure --without-fts ftsfind find
31 New tests, -readable, -writable, -executable. These check that a file
32 can be read, written or executed respectively.
34 * Major changes in release 4.2.27
36 ** Warnings of Future Changes
38 The test -perm /000 currently matches no files, but for greater
39 consistency with -perm -000, this will be changed to match all files;
40 this change will probably be made in early 2006. Meanwhile, a warning
41 message is given if you do this.
43 ** Bug Fixes
45 If xargs is invoked with many short arguments on PPC systems running
46 the Linux kernel, we no longer get an "argument list too long" error
47 from the operating system.
49 Fixed a bug in the test suite which caused it to spuriously fail on
50 systems where ARG_MAX is different to the value used by the Linux
51 kernel on 32-bit x86-architecture systems.
53 On systems running the Linux kernel, "find -printf %F" no longer
54 produces the wrong answer for files on filesystems that have been
55 remounted elsewhere using "mount --bind". (Savannah bug #14921).
57 ** Documentation Changes
59 Following some extensive and detailed review comments from Aaron
60 Hawley, the material in the manual pages and the Texinfo manual are
61 now synchronised.
63 The %M format specifier of "find -printf" is now documented, although
64 it has existed since release 4.2.5.
66 The 'find' manual page now correctly documents the fact that -regex
67 defaults to using Emacs-style regular expressions (though this can be
68 changed).
70 * Major changes in release 4.2.26
72 ** Public Service Announcements
74 I'd like to point out a second time that the interpretation of '-perm
75 +mode' has changed to be more POSIX-compliant. If you want the old
76 behaviour of the GNU extension you should use '-perm /mode'. See the
77 NEWS entry for findutils version 4.2.21 for details.
79 ** Functional Changes
81 The xargs command now supports a new option (--delimiter) which allows
82 input items to be separated by characters other than null and
83 whitespace. This resolves Savannah support request sr #102914.
85 Sometimes find needs to read the /etc/mtab file (or perform the
86 equivalent operation on systems not using /etc/mtab). If this
87 information is needed butnot available, find now exits with an error
88 message non-zero status. If the information is not needed, find will
89 not spuriously fail.
91 A new xargs option --delimiter allows the input delimiter to be
92 changed (previously \0 was the only choice unless you use the -L
93 option, which changes other semantics too).
95 ** Bug Fixes
97 If the environment size is too large to allow xargs to operate
98 normally, 'xargs --help' still works (now).
100 If the input to xargs is a large number of very short options (for
101 example, one character each), earlier versions of xargs would fail
102 with 'Argument list too long'. However, since this is precisely the
103 problem that xargs was invented to solve, this is a bug. Hence on
104 those systems we now correctly use a shorter command line. This
105 problem particularly affected 64-bit Linux systems because of the
106 larger size of pointers, although 32-bit Linux systems were also
107 affected (albeit for longer command lines). In theory the same
108 problem could affect 'find -exec {} +', but that's much less likely
109 (even so, the bug is fixed there too).
111 Bugfix for an unusual failure mode (Savannah bug #14842) where an
112 attempt to allocate more space for directory contents succeeds but is
113 incorrectly diagnosed as a failure. The likelihood of you
114 experiencing this depends on your architecture, operating system and
115 resource limits. This failure has been observed in a directory
116 containing 35396 entries.
118 ** Documentation Changes
120 The EXAMPLES section of the find manual page now correctly describes
121 the symbolic and octal modes for the -perm test.
123 The documentation and "--help" usage information for the -L, -l, -I
124 and -i options have been clarified (but the behaviour has not changed).
126 The documentation now explains more clearly what happens when you use
127 "-L -type l".
129 * Major changes in release 4.2.25
131 ** Bug Fixes
133 find -perm /440 (which should succeed if a file is readable by its
134 owner or group) now works. Previously there was a bug which caused
135 this to be treated as "find -perm 440".
137 Some files in the xargs test suite have been renamed to avoid problems
138 on operating systems whoch cannot distinguish filenames on the basis
139 of upper/lower case distinctions.
141 The software now builds on Cygwin, including the generated file
142 regexprops.texi.
144 Findutils should now build once again on systems supporting AFS, but
145 this support has not recently been fully tested. Findutils should
146 also (once again) build on Cygwin.
148 ** Other Changes
150 The test suite for find is now much more extensive.
152 * Major changes in release 4.2.24
154 ** Documentation Changes
156 The manual now includes a "Worked Examples" section which talks about
157 the various ways in which findutils can be used to perform common
158 tasks, and why some of these alternatives are better than others.
160 The -I option of xargs (which is required by the POSIX standard) is
161 now documented.
163 We now document the fact that find ensures that commands run by -ok
164 and -okdir don't steal find's input. Find does this by redirecting
165 the command's standard input from stdin.
167 Many documentation readability enhancements and proofreading fixes
168 were contributed by Aaron Hawley.
170 ** Functional Changes
172 *** Functional changes in locate
174 The "--regex" option of locate now assumes the regular expression to
175 be in the same syntax as is used in GNU Emacs, though this can be
176 changed with the new option --regextype. This is a change from the
177 existing behaviour (which was to use POSIX Basic Regular Expressions).
178 Since this feature is releatively new anyway, I though it was more
179 useful to have compatibility between regular expression handling in
180 find and locate than to maintain the short-lived previous behaviour of
181 locate.
183 The locate program now also supports a "--regextype" long option which
184 controls which regular expression syntax is understood by locate.
185 This is a long option and has no single-letter 'short option'
186 equivalent.
188 *** Functional changes in find
190 The regular expression syntax understood by "find" can be changed with
191 the -regextype option; this option is positional, meaning that you can
192 have several tests, each using a distinct syntax (this is not
193 recommended practice however).
195 The default regular expression syntax is substantially the same as
196 that recognised by GNU Emacs, except for the fact that "." will match
197 a newline.
199 The leaf optimisation can be disabled with the configure option
200 "--disable-leaf-optimisation", which is equivalent to specifying
201 "-noleaf" on all find command lines. This is useful for systems
202 having filesystems which do not provide traditional Unix behaviour for
203 the link count on directories (for example Cygwin and the Solaris 9
204 HSFS implementation).
206 ** Bug Fixes
208 *** Bug Fixes for find
210 The -iregex test now works once again on systems that lack
211 re_search() (that is, systems on which findutils needs to use the
212 gnulib version of this function).
214 find -regex now once again uses GNU Emacs-compatible regular
215 expressions.
217 If invoked with stderr closed, the -fprint and -fprintf actions now no
218 longer cause error messages to be sent into the output file.
220 If the link count of a directory is less that two, the leaf
221 optimisation is now disabled for that directory. This should allow
222 searching of non-Unix filesystems to be more reliable on systems that
223 don't take the trouble to make their filesystems look like traditional
224 Unix filesystems. Some filesystems don't even take the trouble to
225 have a link count of less than two and for these, -noleaf is still
226 required unless --disable-leaf-optimisation was used at configure time.
228 The "%Y" directive for the -printf action now no longer changes find's
229 idea of the mode of the file, so this means among other things that
230 "-printf %Y %y" now works properly. This is Savannah bug #13973.
232 * Major changes in release 4.2.23
234 ** Documentation Changes
236 The -L and -I options of xargs are currently incompatible (but should
237 not be).
239 Improved the documentation for -execdir and -okdir.
241 ** Functional Changes to updatedb
243 File names ending in "/" which are specified as an argument to
244 --prunepaths (or in $PRUNEPATHS) don't work, so we now issue an error
245 message if the user tries to do that. The obvious exception of course
246 is "/" which does work and is not rejected.
249 * Major changes in release 4.2.22
251 ** Security Fixes
253 If a directory entry searched with "find -L" is a symbolic link to
254 ".", we no longer loop indefinitely. This problem affected find
255 versions 4.2.19, 4.2.20 and 4.2.21. This problem allows users to make
256 "find" loop indefinitely. This is in effect a denial of service and
257 could be used to prevent updates to the locate database or to defeat
258 file security checks based on find. However, it should be noted that
259 you should not use "find -L" in security-sensitive scenarios.
261 ** Other Bug Fixes
263 None in this release.
265 ** Functional Changes to locate
267 A locate database can now be supplied on stdin, using '-' as a element
268 of the database-path. If more than one database-path element is '-',
269 later instances are ignored.
271 A new option to locate, '--all' ('-A') causes matches to be limited to
272 entries which match all given patterns, not entries which match
273 one or more patterns.
275 ** Documentation Changes
277 Some typos in the manual pages have been fixed. Various parts of the
278 manual now point out that it is good practice to quote the argument of
279 "-name". The manpage now has a "NON-BUGS" section which explains some
280 symptoms that look like bugs but aren't. The explanations of the "%k"
281 and "%b" directives to "find -printf" have been imrpoved.
284 * Major changes in release 4.2.21
285 ** Functional Changes to find
287 The GNU extension "find ... -perm +MODE" has been withdrawn because it
288 is incompatible with POSIX in obscure cases like "find ... -perm ++r".
289 Use the new syntax "find ... -perm /MODE" instead. Old usages will
290 still continue to work, so long as they don't conflict with POSIX.
292 If the output is going to a terminal, the -print, -fprint, -printf and
293 -fprintf actions now quote "unusual" characters to prevent unwanted
294 effects on the terminal. See "Unusual Characters in File Names" for
295 further details. There is no change to the behaviour when the output
296 is not going to a terminal. The locate program does the same thing,
297 unless the -0 option is in effect (in which case the filenames are
298 printed as-is).
300 ** Functional Changes to locate
302 The locate command will now read each locate database at most once.
303 This means that if you are using multiple databases and are searching
304 for more than one name, the results will now be printed in a different
305 order (and if you specified a small limit with --limit, you may get a
306 different set of results).
308 A new option '--print' for locate causes it to print the matching
309 results even if the '--count' or '--statistics' option is in effect.
311 ** Bug Fixes
312 find /blah/blah/blah -depth -empty now works once again.
314 The -regex and -iregex tests of find now correctly accept POSIX Basic
315 Regular Expressions. (Savannah bug #12999)
317 The updatedb program now works on systems where "su" does not support
318 the "-s" option, for example Solaris.
320 * Major changes in release 4.2.20
321 ** Internationalization and Localization
322 Updated Vietnamese and Dutch translations.
324 ** Bug Fixes
325 Minor bugfix affecting only those who compile from the CVS repository,
326 as opposed to those who compile from the source releases.
328 * Major changes in release 4.2.19
329 ** Bug Fixes
331 find should now no longer hang on systems which lack the O_NOFOLLOW
332 flag to open(2) and which are clients of an unresponsive NFS server
333 (Savannah bug #12044).
335 We now avoid inappropriately failing for "find -L foo" or "find -H
336 foo" if foo is a symbolic link (Savannah bug #12181). Previously we
337 used to fail with the error message "Too many levels of symbolic
338 links".
340 "find . -false -exec foo {} +" no longer runs an extra instance of foo
341 when find exits (Savannah bug #12230).
343 If the chdir() safety check fails but we can no longer get back to
344 where we started, exit with an explanatory (fatal) error message.
345 This does not happen on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD because the safety check
346 is not needed (the security problem the safety check protects against
347 is prevented in a cleaner way on those systems).
349 "make distclean" no longer deletes regex.c (which "make all" needs).
351 ** Functionality Changes
352 "find -printf "%h\n" will now print "." for files in the current directory.
353 Previously it printed nothing (but there was a bug in the %h
354 implementation anyway). This fixes Savannah bug #12085.
356 Should now build (again) on non-C99-compliant systems.
358 ** Documentation enhancements
359 Fixed some typos and clarified wording in "Working with automounters".
361 ** Internationalization and Localization
362 New Vietnamese message translation.
363 \f
364 * Major changes in release 4.2.18
365 ** Bug Fixes
366 *** "find -depth" was missing out non-leaf directories when they contain
367 non-directories. This affected findutils releases 4.2.15,
368 4.2.16 and 4.2.17, but the bug is now fixed.
369 *** Find no longer hangs on systems which are clients of unresponsive
370 NFS servers.
371 ** Documentation improvements
372 *** Improvements and corrections to the find.1 manpage, including corrections to the descriptions of -H and -L.
373 \f
374 * Major changes in release 4.2.17
375 ** Bug Fixes
376 *** bug #11861 undefined symbol "basename" on IRIX 5.3
377 *** bug #11865 xargs -i regression (as compared to findutils-4.2.12)
378 *** bug #11866 Typo in pred_okdir renders it useless (affecting 4.2.16 only)
379 *** patch #3723 fix recent process_top_path change (for -execdir on /)
380 *** Fixing bug #11866 and applying patch #3723 made -execdir work much better.
381 *** find bar/baz/ugh now works again if baz is a symbolic link (broken
382 in 4.2.15).
383 \f
384 * Major changes in release 4.2.16
385 ** Functionality Changes
386 *** Updated the message catalogues for the translated messages.
387 *** The subfs filesystem is now treated the same as the autofs
388 filesystem is.
389 *** New translations: Belarusian, Catalan, Greek, Esperanto,
390 Finnish, Irish, Croatian, Hungarian, Japanese, Luganda,
391 Malay, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian, Chinese (simplified).
393 ** Bug Fixes
394 *** The -execdir action now works correctly for files named on the
395 command line.
396 \f
397 * Major changes in release 4.2.15
398 ** Functionality Changes
399 *** locate now supports matching regular expression (--regex).
400 *** --enable-d_type-optimization (introduced in findutils 4.2.13) is now turned on by default.
401 \f
402 * Major changes in release 4.2.14
403 ** Functionality Changes
404 *** New options -L, -P, -H for locate. The work in the same was as the same options for find.
405 ** Bug Fixes
406 *** Don't include the "findutils/find/testsuite/find.gnu" subdirectory in the
407 distributed tar file more than once.
408 *** Should now build on Solaris once again.
409 *** -xtype and -printf %Y now work correctly for symbolic links once again
410 ** Documentation improvements
411 *** All options for "locate" are now documented
412 \f
413 * Major changes in release 4.2.13
414 ** Performance Enhancements
415 *** On Linux and some other systems, a large performance improvement,
416 because we can eliminate many of the calls to lstat() (in extreme
417 cases, 99% of them). Limited testing shows a 2x speedup on NFS
418 filesystems. Other systems which can make use of this enhancement
419 include Mac OS X and *BSD.
420 \f
421 * Major changes in release 4.2.12
422 ** Functionality Changes
423 *** find is now POSIX-compliant, as far as I know.
424 *** -exec ... {} + now works.
425 *** New actions -execdir and -okdir which are like -exec and -ok but more secure.
426 *** "locate -w" is now a synonym for "locate --wholepath".
427 *** An empty path entry in the locate database path (for example "::" in
428 $LOCATE_PATH or in the argument to "locate -d") is taken to mean
429 the default database, whose name is hard-coded in locate.
430 ** Bug Fixes
431 *** If find or xargs cannot write to stdout, for example because
432 output is redirected to a file and the disk is full, the
433 relevant program will return a non-zero exit status.
434 \f
435 * Major changes in release 4.2.11
436 ** Bug Fixes
437 *** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW.
438 *** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a.
439 ** Functionality Changes
440 *** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line,
441 or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce
442 a more helpful error message.
443 *** locate -b is now a synonym for locate --basename
444 *** locate now supports a --statistics (or -S) option, which prints some
445 statistics about the locate databases.
446 *** Implemented the -samefile option.
447 ** Documentation improvements
448 *** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations".
449 *** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to Stepan Kasal)
450 ** Bug Fixes
451 *** locate's options -i and -w now work with the -e option (previously a bug
452 prevented this).
453 \f
454 * Major changes in release 4.2.10
455 ** Bug Fixes
456 *** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly
457 also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
458 systems too.
459 \f
460 * Major changes in release 4.2.9
461 ** Functionality Changes
462 *** 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_".
463 *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms
464 for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
465 now deprecated.
466 ** Bug Fixes
467 *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.
468 Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
469 invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
470 for next time.
471 *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
472 *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune
473 is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
474 ** Documentation improvements
475 *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime
476 and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
477 \f
478 * Major changes in release 4.2.8
479 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
480 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
481 findutils-4.2.8.
482 \f
483 * Major changes in release 4.2.7
484 ** Functionality Changes
485 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
486 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
487 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
488 ** Documentation improvements
489 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
490 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
491 are not are explained in this chapter.
492 ** Bug Fixes
493 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
494 have it.
495 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
496 on Solaris).
497 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
498 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
499 \f
500 * Major changes in release 4.2.6
501 ** Bug Fixes
502 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
503 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
504 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
505 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
506 #9043.
507 \f
508 * Major changes in release 4.2.5
509 ** Functionality Changes
510 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
511 find will follow symbolic links.
512 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
513 it is the default).
514 ** Documentation improvements
515 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
516 ** Bug Fixes
517 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
518 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
519 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
520 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
521 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
522 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
523 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
524 \f
525 * Major changes in release 4.2.4
526 ** Functionality Changes
527 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
528 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
529 locate).
530 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
531 doesn't support that much).
532 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
533 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
534 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
535 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
536 by the use of the -nowarn option.
537 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
538 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
539 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
540 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
541 grep -c).
542 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
543 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
544 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
545 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
546 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
547 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
548 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
549 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
550 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
551 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
552 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
553 ** Bug Fixes
554 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
555 systems that have non-writable string constants.
556 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
557 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
558 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
559 value).
560 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
561 \f
562 * Major changes in release 4.2.3
563 ** Functionality Changes
564 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
565 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
566 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
567 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
568 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
569 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
570 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
571 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
572 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
573 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
574 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
575 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
576 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
577 directory we've just returned out of).
578 ** Other Changes
579 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
580 \f
581 * Major changes in release 4.2.2
582 ** Documentation improvements
583 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
584 ** Bug Fixes
585 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
586 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
587 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
588 ** Other Changes
589 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
590 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
591 now.
592 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
593 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
594 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
595 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
596 \f
597 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
598 ** Bug Fixes
599 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
600 requires it, as explained at
601 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
602 \f
603 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
604 ** Bug Fixes
605 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
606 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
607 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
608 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
609 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
610 ** Other Changes
611 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
612 \f
613 * Major changes in release 4.2.0
614 ** Functionality Changes
615 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
616 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
617 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
618 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
619 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
620 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
621 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
622 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
623 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
624 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
625 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
626 find stats the file. There is also an option
627 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
628 ** Documentation improvements
629 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
630 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
631 The find manual page also now includes a section
632 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
633 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
634 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
635 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
636 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
637 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
638 has been improved.
639 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
640 ** Bug Fixes
641 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
642 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
643 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
644 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
645 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
646 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
647 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
648 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
649 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
650 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
651 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
652 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
653 database if it fails.
654 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
655 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
656 locate database.
657 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
658 This was broken in 4.1.20.
659 \f
660 * Major changes in release 4.1.20:
661 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
662 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
663 a gap just in case.
664 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
665 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
666 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
667 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
668 README-CVS).
669 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
670 \f
671 * Major changes in release 4.1.7:
672 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
673 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
674 \f
675 * Major changes in release 4.1.6:
676 correct bug in prune.
677 added --ignore-case option for locate
679 * Major changes in release 4.1.5:
680 Add support for large files
682 * Major changes in release 4.1.4:
683 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
685 * Major changes in release 4.1.3:
686 added internationalization and localization.
688 * Major changes in release 4.1.1:
689 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
690 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
692 * Major changes in release 4.1:
694 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
695 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
696 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
697 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
698 \f
699 * Major changes in release 4.0:
701 ** Documentation:
702 *** Texinfo manual.
703 *** Man page for updatedb.
704 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
706 ** find:
707 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
708 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
709 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
710 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
711 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
712 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
714 ** locate:
715 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
716 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
717 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
718 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
719 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
720 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
721 some systems.
722 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
724 ** updatedb:
725 *** Takes command-line options.
727 ** xargs:
728 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
729 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
730 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
731 \f
732 * Major changes in release 3.8:
734 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
735 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
736 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
737 \f
738 * Major changes in release 3.7:
740 ** locate can search multiple databases
741 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
742 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
744 --//--
745 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
747 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
748 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
749 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
750 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
751 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf