1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
2 * Major changes in release 4.3.11-CVS
6 When the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set, "find -perm
7 +a+w" is rejected as invalid. Some other similar mode strings
8 starting with '+' which are not valid in POSIX are also rejected.
10 The -prune action now always evaluates as true (this is also a
15 #21039: Setting the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable now turns off
16 warnings by default, because POSIX requires that only diagnostic
17 messages (and -ok prompts) are printed on STDERR, and diagnostic
18 messages must also result in a nonzero exit status.
20 #20970: Trailing slash on directory arguments breaks -name. "find
21 foo/ -name foo" now correctly matches foo and printf foo/. See POSIX
22 interp http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/uploads/40/14959/AI-186.txt
24 #20803: POSIX requires that -prune always returns true. Previously it
25 returned false when -depth was in effect and true otherwise.
27 ** Documentation Fixes
29 #21270: Formatting fixes to the xargs.1 manual page, including making
30 options bold instead of italic and making OPTIONS a section header
31 rather than a subsection.
33 #21628: find -perm /000 matches all files rather than none, since
34 findutils-4.3.3. The Texinfo documentation is now consistent with the
35 manual page on this point.
37 * Major changes in release 4.3.10, 2007-11-13
41 #21568: findutils gnulib code does not match the date in
42 import-gnulib.config. We now check out the gnulib code via
45 * Major changes in release 4.3.9, 2007-11-11
49 Findutils version 4.3.9 is released under version 3 of the GNU General
54 #20834: Avoid segmentation violation for -execdir when $PATH is
55 unset. Assume that the PATH is safe in this situation.
57 #20310: configure uses hosts's support status for "sort -z" when
58 generating the updatedb script for use on the target. This is
59 inappropriate when cross-compiling, so avoid doing that.
61 #20263: Compilation fix for DEC Alpha OSF/1 cc, which forbids the
62 ordering comparison of function pointers.
64 #20139: find -[acm]time -N (wrongly) includes files from N days ago,
65 as well as (correctly) from less than N days ago.
67 #20273: When xargs is successful without consuming all of stdin (for
68 example, with the -E option), and stdin is seekable, xargs now
69 correctly restores the file position, even on platforms where exit()
70 does not follow the POSIX rules of doing likewise. Likewise for find
71 (for example, with the -ok action).
73 #20547: The version information printed by find, xargs, locate,
74 updatedb, frcode and code now complies with the GNU Project's coding
77 #20662: Avoid memory leak in find -name and other places affected by
78 gnulib dirname module. The leak had been present since 4.3.1.
80 #20751: Avoid memory corruption in find -ls that has been present
83 #20871: Assertion failure introduced in 4.3.3, when oldfind is invoked
84 in a directory where the parent directory lacks search permission.
88 #20594: Allow fine-tuning of the default argument size used by xargs
89 and find at ./configure time.
91 #20688: The warning printed by -name or -iname when the pattern to
92 match contains a slash can now be silenced by -nowarn. This warning
93 was originally introduced unconditionally in 4.2.21.
95 Translation of locate --limit problems is improved.
97 POSIX will standardise -path, so the documentation no longer claims
98 that -wholename is the 'canonical' test, and -ipath no longer
101 ** Documentation Fixes
103 Point out more explicitly that the subsecond timestamp support
104 introduced by findutils-4.3.3 introduces a change in the format of
107 Also explain that when reporting a bug, you should check the most
108 recent findutils release first.
110 Introduced doc/find-maint.texi, a maintenance manual for findutils.
112 Added an extra worked example for find (copying a subset of files).
114 The locate command's manual page now has a HISTORY section.
116 #20951: Very bad/unclear/confusing documentation of security checks in
119 #20865: Better documentation on the fact that -delete implies -depth
120 and that -delete interacts badly with -prune.
122 #20552: Fixed typos, formatting and section ordering issues in the
125 #20529: removed spurious 'o' in description of "xargs -a" in
128 #20232: The --max-database-age option of locate was added in release
129 4.3.3, but this file (NEWS) did not previously mention this fact.
133 Updated Dutch translation.
136 * Major changes in release 4.3.8, 2007-06-12
140 #20157: Avoid segfault in locate when run as root. This is caused by
141 a buffer overrun, but at this time no exploit mechanism is known.
143 * Major changes in release 4.3.7, 2007-06-09
145 ** Functional changes
147 Locate can now read old-format locate databases generated on machines
148 with a different byte order. It does this by guessing the byte order,
149 so the result is not completely reliable. If you need to share
150 databases between machines of different architectures, you should use
151 the LOCATE02 format (which has other advantages, as explained in the
156 #20014: Findutils-4.3.7 includes a patch for a potential security
157 problem in locate. When locate read an old-format database, it read
158 file names into a fixed-length buffer allocated on the heap without
159 checking for overflow. Although overflowing a heap buffer is often
160 somewhat safer than overflowing a buffer on the stack, this bug still
161 has potential security implications.
163 This bug also affected the following previous findutils releases:
165 - All releases prior to 4.2.31
166 - Findutils 4.3.0 to 4.3.6.
168 This bug has been assigned CVE number CVE-2007-2452.
172 #20128: Fix compilation error of find/tree.c on AIX with GCC.
174 #20005: Tests -mtime -n and -mtime +n incorrectly treated like -mtime n.
176 #19983: include_next causes compilation failure in findutils 4.3.6 on
179 #19981: Don't call setgroups if the function isn't available. This
180 fixes Savannah bug# 19981.
182 #19980: Don't use the functions putw() or getw() since these are not
183 in current POSIX. Use the gnulib version of wcwidth() where the
184 system does not provide it.
186 #19979: Compilation errors on BeOS
188 #19970: Cannot cast from pointer to bool using gnulib's <stdbool.h>
190 #19967: Use of __attribute((__noreturn__)) makes compilation fail with
191 some non-GCC compilers
193 #19966: find should link against -lm for modf() and fabs()
195 #19965: Compilation failure on OSF/1 4.0; non-declaration of uintmax_t
197 #19948: Assertion failure O_NOFOLLOW != 0 on IRIX 6.5
199 #19871: Typos in find.1
201 #19596: Fixed this bug again, this time in the Texinfo manual (the
202 discussion should compare %b with %s/512, not %s/1024).
204 #19416: _FORTIFY_SOURCE warn_unused_result warnings
206 * Major changes in release 4.3.6, 2007-05-21
210 #19948: Fixed an assertion failure on IRIX 6.5 (O_NOFOLLOW is defined
213 #19923: Fixed an array overrun in groups[] array of 'locate' when run by
214 or as root. This bug appears not to be exploitable. If locate is not
215 installed setuid, the bug is not exploitable. For setuid
216 installations, it is concievable that there could be an information
217 leak if the user uses the -d option or the -e option, though the
218 maintainer has been unable to provoke this on an x86 system.
220 #19871: Spurious .R directives in manpage produced error messages from
221 GNU troff. This is now fixed (they are corrected to .B).
223 #19416: The result of I/O operations in print-related actions is now
224 checked, and failures are reported. Any failure will cause find's
225 exit status to be nonzero. The predicate itself will continue to
230 A variety of changes were made to allow compilation to succeed on
233 #19983: Now compiles on DEC C V5.9-005 on Digital UNIX V4.0 (or at
236 #19970: Compile correctly on C89 systems where the "_Bool" type is not
237 provided, taking into account the limitations of the gnulib
238 replacement for stdbool.h.
240 #19967: Build successfully with C compilers that don't support the GCC
241 construct __attribute__((__noreturn__)).
243 #19966: Findutils should now build on systems which have the modf()
244 and fabs() functions in the maths library, -lm. This includes some
245 versions of HP-UX and Solaris.
247 #19965: Fixed a compilation failure on OSF/1 4.0 (no definition of the
251 * Major changes in release 4.3.5, 2007-05-05
253 ** Functional changes
255 Updatedb can now support he generation of file name databases which
256 are compatible with slocate. For some time, GNU locate has been able
259 The /proc filesystem is excluded from the locate database (by
260 default; change PRUNEPATHS to modify this behaviour).
264 #19806: The -samefile predicate might get fooled by inode reuse. We
265 now hold open a file descriptor on the reference file to prevent this.
267 #19768: Better detection of corrupted old-style locate databases
268 (e.g. if the database is too short to include a complete bigram
271 #19766: The frcode and code programs now detect write errors more
274 #19371: Fix compilation failure on systems which #define open to
275 open64 (and similarly with the close system call). This fixes
276 Savannah bug #19371, affecting AIX 5.3.
278 #19658: When cross-compiling, "make clean" no longer deletes the
279 generated file doc/regexprops.texi, because there is no way to
282 #19391: When xargs knows that the system's actual exec limit is larger
283 than the compiled-in ARG_MAX, use the system's limit without
284 generating an assertion failure.
286 #18203: A duplicate report of bug #17478.
288 #17478: Error messages from find can garble the console.
290 #16378: Assertion failure if stat() returns 00000 as the mode
291 of a file. This apparently can happen occasionally with broken NFS
294 #11668: FreeBSD extensions for time specification are now
295 implemented. In fact, these were included in findutils-4.3.3. The
296 change was listed as a functional change (whcih it is) and this bug
297 report was not mentioned.
299 ** Documentation Fixes
301 The locatedb.5 manpage now documents the (default) LOCATE02 format
302 more clearly, and also documents the slocate database format.
304 The maximum and default values applying to the -s option of xargs are
305 now documented more clearly in the manual page.
307 * Major changes in release 4.3.4, 2007-04-21
311 #19634: Test suite now passes (again) if "." is on your $PATH.
313 #19619: Findutils builds once again on Cygwin.
315 #19617: Nonexistent start points are (once again) diagnosed in
316 ftsfind. This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3.
318 #19616: Fix leaf optimisation and loop detection (which were
319 unreliable in findutils 4.3.3). This bug affected only
322 #19615: find --version no longer claims to be using FTS_CWDFD when it
323 isn't. This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3.
325 #19613: "find -L . -type f" no longer causes an assertion failure when
326 it encounters a symbolic link loop. This bug affected only
329 #19605: Issue an error message (and later return nonzero exit status)
330 if a symbolic link loop was encountered during directory traversal.
332 #19484: bigram.c and code.c fail if the first pathname recorded begins
335 #19483: Inconsistent option highlighting in updatedb manpage
337 #18414: Tests for "find -readable" are skipped for the superuser, as
338 on some systems (e.g. Cygwin with an Administrative user) users can
343 Findutils 4.3.4 includes a translation for the Ukranian language.
346 * Major changes in release 4.3.3, 2007-04-15
348 Fiundutils-4.3.3 was released on 2007-04-15.
352 #19596: Correct the comparison in the find manpage between %b and %s
353 (the divisor is 512 not 1024).
355 #18714: In the POSIX locale, vertical tabs and form feeds are not
358 #18713: Quoted but empty arguments which occur last on an xargs input
359 line are no longer ignored, but instead produce an empty argument.
361 #18554: Documented the construct -exec sh -c 'foo "$@" bar' {} +
363 #18466: we now avoid this bug by limiting "-execdir ...+"
364 to just one argument for the time being. There is a performance
365 penalty for doing this. We hope to make a better fix in a later
368 #18384: excess bracket in xargs --help
370 #18320: Zero bytes in input should give warning
372 #17437: Corrected the handling of X in symbolic permissions (such
373 as-u+w,a+X). This change actually occurred in findutils-4.3.2, but
374 the NEWS file for that release didn't mention it.
376 #17396: find -mtime -atime -ctime does not support fractional part
377 (see "Functional changes" below)
379 #14748: find -perm /zzz gives wrong result when zzz evaluates to an
382 #14535: correctly support case-folding in locate (that is, "locate
383 -i") for multibyte character environments such as UTF-8. Previously,
384 if your search string contained a character which was outside the
385 single-byte-encoding range for UTF-8 for example, then the
386 case-folding behaviour failed to work and only exact matches would be
391 ** Functional changes
393 The -printf action (and similar related actions) now support %S,
394 which is a measurement of the sparseness of a file.
396 The test "-perm /000" now matches all files instead of no files. For
397 over a year find has been issuing warning messages indicating that
398 this change will happen. We now issue a warning indicating that the
399 change has already happened (in 4.3.x only, there is no plan to make
400 this change in the 4.2.x series).
402 The tests -newer, -anewer, -cnewer, -mtime, -atime, -ctime, -amin,
403 -cmin, -mmin and -used now support sub-second timestamps, including
404 the ability to specify times with non-integer arguments.
406 The -printf format specifiers also support sub-second timestamps:
415 The new test -newerXY supports comparison between status times for
416 files. One of the status times for a file being considered (denoted
417 X) is checked against a reference time (denoted Y) for the file whose
418 name id the argument. X and Y can be:
421 B Birth time (st_birthtime, currently unsupported)
424 t Valid only for the reference time; instead of comparison
425 against a file status time, the argument is a time string.
428 For example, -newermm is equivalent to -newer, and -neweram is true if
429 the file being considered was accessed more recently than the
430 reference file was modified. The -newerXY test supports subsecond
431 timestamps where these are available. The X=B variant is not yet
434 If you configure the source code and then run the tests with "make
435 check", the test suite fails rather than defaulting to testing the
438 A new option, --max-database-age, has been added to locate.
441 * Major changes in release 4.3.2, 2006-11-25
445 #18222: find -printf '%H %P' once again prints the right result if
446 more than one start point was given on the command line.
448 #17782: find -execdir now correctly puts the prefix "./" before the
449 expansion of "{}" rather than at the start of the argument it appears
450 in. Please note that if you use the -exec or -execdir actions with a
451 shell, then you may be vulnerable to shell code injection attacks, so
452 don't do that. It's not a security defect in find - you should not be
453 passing untrusted data (such as file names chosen by other people) to
456 #17490: find -regex generated a segfault in findutils-4.3.1, but this
457 is fixed in findutils-4.3.2.
459 #17477: find -printf '%' (that is, where the format has a trailing %)
460 now generates an error message.
462 #17372: The fts-based find executable (the default configuration uses
463 fts) is now much faster when -maxdepth is used on filesystems with
466 #15531: The -prune action now behaves correctly when applied to a file.
468 ** Functional changes
470 The slocate database format is now supported. Preliminary changes
471 intended to eventually allow setuid operation of locate have also been
472 made. For the moment, please don't install GNU locate as a
473 set-user-ID program (except for testing purposes; if you do so, please
474 make sure that untrusted users cannot execute the set-user-ID locate
477 Use of an slocate database which was built with a nonzero security
478 mode (at the moment, GNU updatedb will not do this) forces locate's
479 "-e" option to be turned on, which has an effect on the "-S" option
480 which is probably surprising for most users.
483 ** Documentation Fixes
485 The global effect of options (other than -daystart and -follow) is now
486 explained more clearly in the manual page. Savannah bug #15360.
489 * Major changes in release 4.3.1, 2006-08-06
493 Find now follows POSIX rules for determining where directories end and
494 expressions start. This means that "find \(1 \!2 \, \)" now searches
495 in the four named directories, rather than trying to parse an
496 expression. (Savannah bug #15235).
498 You now get a more helpful error message when you use command lines
499 which have missing expressions, such as
506 Savannah bug #15800: If find finds more subdirectories within a parent
507 directory than it previously expected to based on the link count of
508 the parent, the resulting error message now gives the correct
509 directory name (previously an error message was issued but it
510 specified the wrong directory).
512 Savannah bug #16738: "find .... -exec ... {} +" now works if you have
513 a large environment and many files must be passed to the -exec
514 action. The same problem affected the -execdir action, though since
515 the number of files in a given directory will normally be smaller, the
516 problem was worse for -exec.
518 Savannah bug #16579: Updatedb now works if it is running as a user
519 whose login shell is not actually a shell.
521 There have also been a number of documentation improvements (includng
522 Savannah bug #16269).
524 ** Functional changes
526 For find, debug output can now be enabled at runtime with the -D
527 option. This causes the printing of various sorts of information
528 about find's internal state and progress.
530 The find option -nowarn cannot itself produce a warning (this used to
531 happen with commands like "find . -name quux -nowarn -print").
533 ** Performance Enhancements
535 Find now has a rudimentary cost-based optimiser. It has an idea of
536 the basic cost of each test (i.e. that -name is very cheap while -size
537 is more expensive). It re-orders tests bearing in mind the cost of
538 each test and its likely success. Predicates with side effects (for
539 example -delete or -exec) are not reordered. The optimiser is not
540 yet enabled by default, but the new option -O controls the query
541 optimisation level. To see this in action, try
542 find -D opt -O3 . -type f -o -type c -o -size 555 -name Z
543 and compare the optimised query with:
544 find -D opt -O3 . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
546 find -D opt . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
548 Over time, as optimisations are proven to be robust and correct, they
549 will be moved to lower optimisation levels. Some optimisations have
550 always been performed by find (for example -name is always done early
555 Findutils 4.3.1 includes updated translations for the following
557 Vietnamese, Belarusian, Catalan, Danish, German, Greek, Esperanto,
558 Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Irish, Galician, Croatian, Hungarian,
559 Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Luganda, Malay, Dutch, Polish,
560 Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Kinyarwanda,
561 Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish, Chinese (simplified),
562 Chinese (traditional), Bulgarian
564 * Major changes in release 4.3.0, 2005-12-12
566 The 4.3.x release series are currently 'development' releases. Please
567 test it, but think carefully before installing it in a production
568 system. New features in findutils-4.3.x are under development; they
569 may change or go away.
571 All changes up to and including findutils-4.2.27 are included in this
572 release. In addition the following changes are new in this release:
574 ** Functional Changes
576 By default, find now uses the fts() function to search the file
577 system. The use of fts greatly increases find's ability to search
578 extremely deep directory hierarchites.
580 You can tell that the version of find you are using uses FTS, because
581 the output of "find --version" will include the word "FTS".
583 Currently two binaries for 'find' are built. The configure option
584 --without-fts can be used to select whether 'find' uses fts:
587 default configuration find oldfind
588 configure --with-fts find oldfind
589 configure --without-fts ftsfind find
591 New tests, -readable, -writable, -executable. These check that a file
592 can be read, written or executed respectively.
594 * Major changes in release 4.2.27, 2005-12-06
596 ** Warnings of Future Changes
598 The test -perm /000 currently matches no files, but for greater
599 consistency with -perm -000, this will be changed to match all files;
600 this change will probably be made in early 2006. Meanwhile, a warning
601 message is given if you do this.
605 If xargs is invoked with many short arguments on PPC systems running
606 the Linux kernel, we no longer get an "argument list too long" error
607 from the operating system.
609 Fixed a bug in the test suite which caused it to spuriously fail on
610 systems where ARG_MAX is different to the value used by the Linux
611 kernel on 32-bit x86-architecture systems.
613 On systems running the Linux kernel, "find -printf %F" no longer
614 produces the wrong answer for files on filesystems that have been
615 remounted elsewhere using "mount --bind". (Savannah bug #14921).
617 ** Documentation Changes
619 Following some extensive and detailed review comments from Aaron
620 Hawley, the material in the manual pages and the Texinfo manual are
623 The %M format specifier of "find -printf" is now documented, although
624 it has existed since release 4.2.5.
626 The 'find' manual page now correctly documents the fact that -regex
627 defaults to using Emacs-style regular expressions (though this can be
630 * Major changes in release 4.2.26, 2005-11-19
632 ** Public Service Announcements
634 I'd like to point out a second time that the interpretation of '-perm
635 +mode' has changed to be more POSIX-compliant. If you want the old
636 behaviour of the GNU extension you should use '-perm /mode'. See the
637 NEWS entry for findutils version 4.2.21 for details.
639 ** Functional Changes
641 The xargs command now supports a new option (--delimiter) which allows
642 input items to be separated by characters other than null and
643 whitespace. This resolves Savannah support request sr #102914.
645 Sometimes find needs to read the /etc/mtab file (or perform the
646 equivalent operation on systems not using /etc/mtab). If this
647 information is needed but not available, find now exits with an error
648 message non-zero status. If the information is not needed, find will
651 A new xargs option --delimiter allows the input delimiter to be
652 changed (previously \0 was the only choice unless you use the -L
653 option, which changes other semantics too).
657 If the environment size is too large to allow xargs to operate
658 normally, 'xargs --help' still works (now).
660 If the input to xargs is a large number of very short options (for
661 example, one character each), earlier versions of xargs would fail
662 with 'Argument list too long'. However, since this is precisely the
663 problem that xargs was invented to solve, this is a bug. Hence on
664 those systems we now correctly use a shorter command line. This
665 problem particularly affected 64-bit Linux systems because of the
666 larger size of pointers, although 32-bit Linux systems were also
667 affected (albeit for longer command lines). In theory the same
668 problem could affect 'find -exec {} +', but that's much less likely
669 (even so, the bug is fixed there too).
671 Bugfix for an unusual failure mode (Savannah bug #14842) where an
672 attempt to allocate more space for directory contents succeeds but is
673 incorrectly diagnosed as a failure. The likelihood of you
674 experiencing this depends on your architecture, operating system and
675 resource limits. This failure has been observed in a directory
676 containing 35396 entries.
678 ** Documentation Changes
680 The EXAMPLES section of the find manual page now correctly describes
681 the symbolic and octal modes for the -perm test.
683 The documentation and "--help" usage information for the -L, -l, -I
684 and -i options have been clarified (but the behaviour has not changed).
686 The documentation now explains more clearly what happens when you use
689 * Major changes in release 4.2.25, 2005-09-03
693 find -perm /440 (which should succeed if a file is readable by its
694 owner or group) now works. Previously there was a bug which caused
695 this to be treated as "find -perm 440".
697 Some files in the xargs test suite have been renamed to avoid problems
698 on operating systems whoch cannot distinguish filenames on the basis
699 of upper/lower case distinctions.
701 The software now builds on Cygwin, including the generated file
704 Findutils should now build once again on systems supporting AFS, but
705 this support has not recently been fully tested. Findutils should
706 also (once again) build on Cygwin.
710 The test suite for find is now much more extensive.
712 * Major changes in release 4.2.24, 2005-07-29
714 ** Documentation Changes
716 The manual now includes a "Worked Examples" section which talks about
717 the various ways in which findutils can be used to perform common
718 tasks, and why some of these alternatives are better than others.
720 The -I option of xargs (which is required by the POSIX standard) is
723 We now document the fact that find ensures that commands run by -ok
724 and -okdir don't steal find's input. Find does this by redirecting
725 the command's standard input from stdin.
727 Many documentation readability enhancements and proofreading fixes
728 were contributed by Aaron Hawley.
730 ** Functional Changes
732 *** Functional changes in locate
734 The "--regex" option of locate now assumes the regular expression to
735 be in the same syntax as is used in GNU Emacs, though this can be
736 changed with the new option --regextype. This is a change from the
737 existing behaviour (which was to use POSIX Basic Regular Expressions).
738 Since this feature is releatively new anyway, I though it was more
739 useful to have compatibility between regular expression handling in
740 find and locate than to maintain the short-lived previous behaviour of
743 The locate program now also supports a "--regextype" long option which
744 controls which regular expression syntax is understood by locate.
745 This is a long option and has no single-letter 'short option'
748 *** Functional changes in find
750 The regular expression syntax understood by "find" can be changed with
751 the -regextype option; this option is positional, meaning that you can
752 have several tests, each using a distinct syntax (this is not
753 recommended practice however).
755 The default regular expression syntax is substantially the same as
756 that recognised by GNU Emacs, except for the fact that "." will match
759 The leaf optimisation can be disabled with the configure option
760 "--disable-leaf-optimisation", which is equivalent to specifying
761 "-noleaf" on all find command lines. This is useful for systems
762 having filesystems which do not provide traditional Unix behaviour for
763 the link count on directories (for example Cygwin and the Solaris 9
764 HSFS implementation).
768 *** Bug Fixes for find
770 The -iregex test now works once again on systems that lack
771 re_search() (that is, systems on which findutils needs to use the
772 gnulib version of this function).
774 find -regex now once again uses GNU Emacs-compatible regular
777 If invoked with stderr closed, the -fprint and -fprintf actions now no
778 longer cause error messages to be sent into the output file.
780 If the link count of a directory is less that two, the leaf
781 optimisation is now disabled for that directory. This should allow
782 searching of non-Unix filesystems to be more reliable on systems that
783 don't take the trouble to make their filesystems look like traditional
784 Unix filesystems. Some filesystems don't even take the trouble to
785 have a link count of less than two and for these, -noleaf is still
786 required unless --disable-leaf-optimisation was used at configure time.
788 The "%Y" directive for the -printf action now no longer changes find's
789 idea of the mode of the file, so this means among other things that
790 "-printf %Y %y" now works properly. This is Savannah bug #13973.
792 * Major changes in release 4.2.23, 2005-06-19
794 ** Documentation Changes
796 The -L and -I options of xargs are currently incompatible (but should
799 Improved the documentation for -execdir and -okdir.
801 ** Functional Changes to updatedb
803 File names ending in "/" which are specified as an argument to
804 --prunepaths (or in $PRUNEPATHS) don't work, so we now issue an error
805 message if the user tries to do that. The obvious exception of course
806 is "/" which does work and is not rejected.
809 * Major changes in release 4.2.22, 2005-06-12
813 If a directory entry searched with "find -L" is a symbolic link to
814 ".", we no longer loop indefinitely. This problem affected find
815 versions 4.2.19, 4.2.20 and 4.2.21. This problem allows users to make
816 "find" loop indefinitely. This is in effect a denial of service and
817 could be used to prevent updates to the locate database or to defeat
818 file security checks based on find. However, it should be noted that
819 you should not use "find -L" in security-sensitive scenarios.
823 None in this release.
825 ** Functional Changes to locate
827 A locate database can now be supplied on stdin, using '-' as a element
828 of the database-path. If more than one database-path element is '-',
829 later instances are ignored.
831 A new option to locate, '--all' ('-A') causes matches to be limited to
832 entries which match all given patterns, not entries which match
833 one or more patterns.
835 ** Documentation Changes
837 Some typos in the manual pages have been fixed. Various parts of the
838 manual now point out that it is good practice to quote the argument of
839 "-name". The manpage now has a "NON-BUGS" section which explains some
840 symptoms that look like bugs but aren't. The explanations of the "%k"
841 and "%b" directives to "find -printf" have been imrpoved.
844 * Major changes in release 4.2.21, 2005-06-07
845 ** Functional Changes to find
847 The GNU extension "find ... -perm +MODE" has been withdrawn because it
848 is incompatible with POSIX in obscure cases like "find ... -perm ++r".
849 Use the new syntax "find ... -perm /MODE" instead. Old usages will
850 still continue to work, so long as they don't conflict with POSIX.
852 If the output is going to a terminal, the -print, -fprint, -printf and
853 -fprintf actions now quote "unusual" characters to prevent unwanted
854 effects on the terminal. See "Unusual Characters in File Names" for
855 further details. There is no change to the behaviour when the output
856 is not going to a terminal. The locate program does the same thing,
857 unless the -0 option is in effect (in which case the filenames are
860 ** Functional Changes to locate
862 The locate command will now read each locate database at most once.
863 This means that if you are using multiple databases and are searching
864 for more than one name, the results will now be printed in a different
865 order (and if you specified a small limit with --limit, you may get a
866 different set of results).
868 A new option '--print' for locate causes it to print the matching
869 results even if the '--count' or '--statistics' option is in effect.
872 find /blah/blah/blah -depth -empty now works once again.
874 The -regex and -iregex tests of find now correctly accept POSIX Basic
875 Regular Expressions. (Savannah bug #12999)
877 The updatedb program now works on systems where "su" does not support
878 the "-s" option, for example Solaris.
880 * Major changes in release 4.2.20, 2005-03-17
881 ** Internationalization and Localization
882 Updated Vietnamese and Dutch translations.
885 Minor bugfix affecting only those who compile from the CVS repository,
886 as opposed to those who compile from the source releases.
888 * Major changes in release 4.2.19, 2005-03-07
891 find should now no longer hang on systems which lack the O_NOFOLLOW
892 flag to open(2) and which are clients of an unresponsive NFS server
893 (Savannah bug #12044).
895 We now avoid inappropriately failing for "find -L foo" or "find -H
896 foo" if foo is a symbolic link (Savannah bug #12181). Previously we
897 used to fail with the error message "Too many levels of symbolic
900 "find . -false -exec foo {} +" no longer runs an extra instance of foo
901 when find exits (Savannah bug #12230).
903 If the chdir() safety check fails but we can no longer get back to
904 where we started, exit with an explanatory (fatal) error message.
905 This does not happen on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD because the safety check
906 is not needed (the security problem the safety check protects against
907 is prevented in a cleaner way on those systems).
909 "make distclean" no longer deletes regex.c (which "make all" needs).
911 ** Functionality Changes
912 "find -printf "%h\n" will now print "." for files in the current directory.
913 Previously it printed nothing (but there was a bug in the %h
914 implementation anyway). This fixes Savannah bug #12085.
916 Should now build (again) on non-C99-compliant systems.
918 ** Documentation enhancements
919 Fixed some typos and clarified wording in "Working with automounters".
921 ** Internationalization and Localization
922 New Vietnamese message translation.
924 * Major changes in release 4.2.18, 2005-02-16
926 *** "find -depth" was missing out non-leaf directories when they contain
927 non-directories. This affected findutils releases 4.2.15,
928 4.2.16 and 4.2.17, but the bug is now fixed.
929 *** Find no longer hangs on systems which are clients of unresponsive
931 ** Documentation improvements
932 *** Improvements and corrections to the find.1 manpage, including corrections to the descriptions of -H and -L.
934 * Major changes in release 4.2.17, 2005-02-08
936 *** bug #11861 undefined symbol "basename" on IRIX 5.3
937 *** bug #11865 xargs -i regression (as compared to findutils-4.2.12)
938 *** bug #11866 Typo in pred_okdir renders it useless (affecting 4.2.16 only)
939 *** patch #3723 fix recent process_top_path change (for -execdir on /)
940 *** Fixing bug #11866 and applying patch #3723 made -execdir work much better.
941 *** find bar/baz/ugh now works again if baz is a symbolic link (broken
944 * Major changes in release 4.2.16, 2005-02-05
945 ** Functionality Changes
946 *** Updated the message catalogues for the translated messages.
947 *** The subfs filesystem is now treated the same as the autofs
949 *** New translations: Belarusian, Catalan, Greek, Esperanto,
950 Finnish, Irish, Croatian, Hungarian, Japanese, Luganda,
951 Malay, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian, Chinese (simplified).
954 *** The -execdir action now works correctly for files named on the
957 * Major changes in release 4.2.15, 2005-01-29
958 ** Functionality Changes
959 *** locate now supports matching regular expression (--regex).
960 *** --enable-d_type-optimization (introduced in findutils 4.2.13) is now turned on by default.
962 * Major changes in release 4.2.14, 2005-01-25
963 ** Functionality Changes
964 *** New options -L, -P, -H for locate. The work in the same was as the same options for find.
966 *** Don't include the "findutils/find/testsuite/find.gnu" subdirectory in the
967 distributed tar file more than once.
968 *** Should now build on Solaris once again.
969 *** -xtype and -printf %Y now work correctly for symbolic links once again
970 ** Documentation improvements
971 *** All options for "locate" are now documented
973 * Major changes in release 4.2.13, 2005-01-23
974 ** Performance Enhancements
975 *** On Linux and some other systems, a large performance improvement,
976 because we can eliminate many of the calls to lstat() (in extreme
977 cases, 99% of them). Limited testing shows a 2x speedup on NFS
978 filesystems. Other systems which can make use of this enhancement
979 include Mac OS X and *BSD.
981 * Major changes in release 4.2.12, 2005-01-22
982 ** Functionality Changes
983 *** find is now POSIX-compliant, as far as I know.
984 *** -exec ... {} + now works.
985 *** New actions -execdir and -okdir which are like -exec and -ok but more secure.
986 *** "locate -w" is now a synonym for "locate --wholepath".
987 *** An empty path entry in the locate database path (for example "::" in
988 $LOCATE_PATH or in the argument to "locate -d") is taken to mean
989 the default database, whose name is hard-coded in locate.
991 *** If find or xargs cannot write to stdout, for example because
992 output is redirected to a file and the disk is full, the
993 relevant program will return a non-zero exit status.
995 * Major changes in release 4.2.11, 2004-12-12
997 *** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW.
998 *** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a.
999 ** Functionality Changes
1000 *** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line,
1001 or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce
1002 a more helpful error message.
1003 *** locate -b is now a synonym for locate --basename
1004 *** locate now supports a --statistics (or -S) option, which prints some
1005 statistics about the locate databases.
1006 *** Implemented the -samefile option.
1007 ** Documentation improvements
1008 *** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations".
1009 *** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to Stepan Kasal)
1011 *** locate's options -i and -w now work with the -e option (previously a bug
1014 * Major changes in release 4.2.10, 2004-12-06
1016 *** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly
1017 also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
1020 * Major changes in release 4.2.9, 2004-12-05
1021 ** Functionality Changes
1022 *** 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_".
1023 *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms
1024 for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
1027 *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.
1028 Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
1029 invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
1031 *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
1032 *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune
1033 is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
1034 ** Documentation improvements
1035 *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime
1036 and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
1038 * Major changes in release 4.2.8, 2004-11-24
1039 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
1040 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
1043 * Major changes in release 4.2.7, 2004-11-21
1044 ** Functionality Changes
1045 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
1046 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
1047 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
1048 ** Documentation improvements
1049 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
1050 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
1051 are not are explained in this chapter.
1053 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
1055 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
1057 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
1058 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
1060 * Major changes in release 4.2.6, 2004-11-21
1062 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
1063 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
1064 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
1065 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
1068 * Major changes in release 4.2.5, 2004-11-11
1069 ** Functionality Changes
1070 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
1071 find will follow symbolic links.
1072 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
1074 ** Documentation improvements
1075 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
1077 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
1078 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
1079 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
1080 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
1081 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
1082 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
1083 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
1085 * Major changes in release 4.2.4, 2004-11-08
1086 ** Functionality Changes
1087 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
1088 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
1090 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
1091 doesn't support that much).
1092 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
1093 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
1094 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
1095 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
1096 by the use of the -nowarn option.
1097 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
1098 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
1099 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
1100 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
1102 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
1103 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
1104 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
1105 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
1106 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
1107 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
1108 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
1109 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
1110 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
1111 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
1112 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
1114 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
1115 systems that have non-writable string constants.
1116 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
1117 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
1118 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
1120 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
1122 * Major changes in release 4.2.3, 2004-10-30
1123 ** Functionality Changes
1124 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
1125 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
1126 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
1127 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
1128 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
1129 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
1130 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
1131 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
1132 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
1133 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
1134 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
1135 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
1136 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
1137 directory we've just returned out of).
1139 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
1141 * Major changes in release 4.2.2, 2004-10-24
1142 ** Documentation improvements
1143 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
1145 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
1146 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
1147 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
1149 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
1150 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
1152 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
1153 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
1154 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
1155 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
1157 * Major changes in release 4.2.1, 2004-10-17
1159 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
1160 requires it, as explained at
1161 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
1163 * Major changes in release 4.2.1, 2004-10-17
1165 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
1166 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
1167 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
1168 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
1169 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
1171 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
1173 * Major changes in release 4.2.0, 2003-06-14
1174 ** Functionality Changes
1175 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
1176 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
1177 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
1178 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
1179 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
1180 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
1181 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
1182 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
1183 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
1184 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
1185 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
1186 find stats the file. There is also an option
1187 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
1188 ** Documentation improvements
1189 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
1190 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
1191 The find manual page also now includes a section
1192 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
1193 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
1194 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
1195 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
1196 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
1197 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
1199 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
1201 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
1202 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
1203 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
1204 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
1205 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
1206 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
1207 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
1208 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
1209 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
1210 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
1211 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
1212 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
1213 database if it fails.
1214 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
1215 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
1217 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
1218 This was broken in 4.1.20.
1220 * Major changes in release 4.1.20, 2003-06-14:
1221 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
1222 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
1224 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
1225 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
1226 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
1227 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
1229 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
1231 * Major changes in release 4.1.7, 2001-05-20:
1232 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
1233 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
1235 * Major changes in release 4.1.6, 2000-10-10:
1236 correct bug in prune.
1237 added --ignore-case option for locate
1239 * Major changes in release 4.1.5, 2000-04-12:
1240 Add support for large files
1242 * Major changes in release 4.1.4, 2000-02-26:
1243 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
1245 * Major changes in release 4.1.3, 2000-01-27:
1246 added internationalization and localization.
1248 * Major changes in release 4.1.2, 2000-01-18:
1251 * Major changes in release 4.1.1, 1999-08-8:
1252 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
1253 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
1255 * Major changes in release 4.1, 1994-11-3:
1257 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
1258 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
1259 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
1260 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
1262 * Major changes in release 4.0, 1994-11-2:
1266 *** Man page for updatedb.
1267 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
1270 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
1271 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
1272 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
1273 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
1274 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
1275 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
1278 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
1279 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
1280 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
1281 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
1282 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
1283 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
1285 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
1288 *** Takes command-line options.
1291 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
1292 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
1293 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
1295 * Major changes in release 3.8, 1993-03-29:
1297 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
1298 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
1299 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
1301 * Major changes in release 3.7:
1303 ** locate can search multiple databases
1304 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
1305 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
1307 * No NEWS was kept for earlier releases. Known release dates include:
1308 ** release 3.2, 1991-08-28
1309 ** release 3.1, 1991-08-21
1310 ** release 3.0, 1991-08-21
1311 ** release 2.2, 1991-04-05
1312 ** release 2.1, 1991-01-01
1313 ** release 2.0, 1990-11-20
1314 ** release 1.2, 1990-07-03
1315 ** release 1.1, 1990-06-24
1316 ** release 1.0, 1990-06-22
1317 ** beginning of findutils history, 1987-02-21
1320 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
1322 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
1323 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
1324 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
1325 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
1326 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf