1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
2 * Major changes in release 4.3.4-CVS
6 #19616: Fix leaf optimisation and loop detection (which were
7 unreliable in findutils 4.3.3). This bug affected only
10 #19615: find --version no longer claims to be using FTS_CWDFD when it
11 isn't. This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3.
13 #19613: "find -L . -type f" no longer causes an assertion failure when
14 it encounters a symbolic link loop. This bug affected only
17 Findutils-4.3.3 was released on 2007-04-15.
21 * Major changes in release 4.3.3
23 Fiundutils-4.3.3 was released on 2007-04-15.
27 #19596: Correct the comparison in the find manpage between %b and %s
28 (the divisor is 512 not 1024).
30 #18714: In the POSIX locale, vertical tabs and form feeds are not
33 #18713: Quoted but empty arguments which occur last on an xargs input
34 line are no longer ignored, but instead produce an empty argument.
36 #18554: Documented the construct -exec sh -c 'foo "$@" bar' {} +
38 #18466: we now avoid this bug by limiting "-execdir ...+"
39 to just one argument for the time being. There is a performance
40 penalty for doing this. We hope to make a better fix in a later
43 #18384: excess bracket in xargs --help
45 #18320: Zero bytes in input should give warning
47 #17437: Corrected the handling of X in symbolic permissions (such
48 as-u+w,a+X). This change actually occurred in findutils-4.3.2, but
49 the NEWS file for that release didn't mention it.
51 #17396: find -mtime -atime -ctime does not support fractional part
52 (see "Functional changes" below)
54 #14748: find -perm /zzz gives wrong result when zzz evaluates to an
57 #14535: correctly support case-folding in locate (that is, "locate
58 -i") for multibyte character environments such as UTF-8. Previously,
59 if your search string contained a character which was outside the
60 single-byte-encoding range for UTF-8 for example, then the
61 case-folding behaviour failed to work and only exact matches would be
68 The -printf action (and similar related actions) now support %S,
69 which is a measurement of the sparseness of a file.
71 The test "-perm /000" now matches all files instead of no files. For
72 over a year find has been issuing warning messages indicating that
73 this change will happen. We now issue a warning indicating that the
74 change has already happened (in 4.3.x only, there is no plan to make
75 this change in the 4.2.x series).
77 The tests -newer, -anewer, -cnewer, -mtime, -atime, -ctime, -amin,
78 -cmin, -mmin and -used now support sub-second timestamps, including
79 the ability to specify times with non-integer arguments.
81 The -printf format specifiers also support sub-second timestamps:
90 The new test -newerXY supports comparison between status times for
91 files. One of the status times for a file being considered (denoted
92 X) is checked against a reference time (denoted Y) for the file whose
93 name id the argument. X and Y can be:
96 B Birth time (st_birthtime, currently unsupported)
99 t Valid only for the reference time; instead of comparison
100 against a file status time, the argument is a time string.
103 For example, -newermm is equivalent to -newer, and -neweram is true if
104 the file being considered was accessed more recently than the
105 reference file was modified. The -newerXY test supports subsecond
106 timestamps where these are available. The X=B variant is not yet
109 If you configure the sourec code and then run the tests with "make
110 check", the test suite fails rather than defaulting to testing the
114 * Major changes in release 4.3.2
118 #18222: find -printf '%H %P' once again prints the right result if
119 more than one start point was given on the command line.
121 #17782: find -execdir now correctly puts the prefix "./" before the
122 expansion of "{}" rather than at the start of the argument it appears
123 in. Please note that if you use the -exec or -execdir actions with a
124 shell, then you may be vulnerable to shell code injection attacks, so
125 don't do that. It's not a security defect in find - you should not be
126 passing untrusted data (such as file names chosen by other people) to
129 #17490: find -regex generated a segfault in findutils-4.3.1, but this
130 is fixed in findutils-4.3.2.
132 #17477: find -printf '%' (that is, where the format has a trailing %)
133 now generates an error message.
135 #17372: The fts-based find executable (the default configuration uses
136 fts) is now much faster when -maxdepth is used on filesystems with
139 #15531: The -prune action now behaves correctly when applied to a file.
141 ** Functional changes
143 The slocate database format is now supported. Preliminary changes
144 intended to eventually allow setuid operation of locate have also been
145 made. For the moment, please don't install GNU locate as a
146 set-user-ID program (except for testing purposes; if you do so, please
147 make sure that untrusted users cannot execute the set-user-ID locate
150 Use of an slocate database which was built with a nonzero security
151 mode (at the moment, GNU updatedb will not do this) forces locate's
152 "-e" option to be turned on, which has an effect on the "-S" option
153 which is probably surprising for most users.
156 ** Documentation Fixes
158 The global effect of options (other than -daystart and -follow) is now
159 explained more clearly in the manual page. Savannah bug #15360.
162 * Major changes in release 4.3.1
166 Find now follows POSIX rules for determining where directories end and
167 expressions start. This means that "find \(1 \!2 \, \)" now searches
168 in the four named directories, rather than trying to parse an
169 expression. (Savannah bug #15235).
171 You now get a more helpful error message when you use command lines
172 which have missing expressions, such as
179 Savannah bug #15800: If find finds more subdirectories within a parent
180 directory than it previously expected to based on the link count of
181 the parent, the resulting error message now gives the correct
182 directory name (previously an error message was issued but it
183 specified the wrong directory).
185 Savannah bug #16738: "find .... -exec ... {} +" now works if you have
186 a large environment and many files must be passed to the -exec
187 action. The same problem affected the -execdir action, though since
188 the number of files in a given directory will normally be smaller, the
189 problem was worse for -exec.
191 Savannah bug #16579: Updatedb now works if it is running as a user
192 whose login shell is not actually a shell.
194 There have also been a number of documentation improvements (includng
195 Savannah bug #16269).
197 ** Functional changes
199 For find, debug output can now be enabled at runtime with the -D
200 option. This causes the printing of various sorts of information
201 about find's internal state and progress.
203 The find option -nowarn cannot itself produce a warning (this used to
204 happen with commands like "find . -name quux -nowarn -print").
206 ** Performance Enhancements
208 Find now has a rudimentary cost-based optimiser. It has an idea of
209 the basic cost of each test (i.e. that -name is very cheap while -size
210 is more expensive). It re-orders tests bearing in mind the cost of
211 each test and its likely success. Predicates with side effects (for
212 example -delete or -exec) are not reordered. The optimiser is not
213 yet enabled by default, but the new option -O controls the query
214 optimisation level. To see this in action, try
215 find -D opt -O3 . -type f -o -type c -o -size 555 -name Z
216 and compare the optimised query with:
217 find -D opt -O3 . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
219 find -D opt . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
221 Over time, as optimisations are proven to be robust and correct, they
222 will be moved to lower optimisation levels. Some optimisations have
223 always been performed by find (for example -name is always done early
228 Findutils 4.3.1 includes updated translations for the following
230 Vietnamese, Belarusian, Catalan, Danish, German, Greek, Esperanto,
231 Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Irish, Galician, Croatian, Hungarian,
232 Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Luganda, Malay, Dutch, Polish,
233 Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Kinyarwanda,
234 Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish, Chinese (simplified),
235 Chinese (traditional), Bulgarian
237 * Major changes in release 4.3.0
239 The 4.3.x release series are currently 'development' releases. Please
240 test it, but think carefully before installing it in a production
241 system. New features in findutils-4.3.x are under development; they
242 may change or go away.
244 All changes up to and including findutils-4.2.27 are included in this
245 release. In addition the following changes are new in this release:
247 ** Functional Changes
249 By default, find now uses the fts() function to search the file
250 system. The use of fts greatly increases find's ability to search
251 extremely deep directory hierarchites.
253 You can tell that the version of find you are using uses FTS, because
254 the output of "find --version" will include the word "FTS".
256 Currently two binaries for 'find' are built. The configure option
257 --without-fts can be used to select whether 'find' uses fts:
260 default configuration find oldfind
261 configure --with-fts find oldfind
262 configure --without-fts ftsfind find
264 New tests, -readable, -writable, -executable. These check that a file
265 can be read, written or executed respectively.
267 * Major changes in release 4.2.27
269 ** Warnings of Future Changes
271 The test -perm /000 currently matches no files, but for greater
272 consistency with -perm -000, this will be changed to match all files;
273 this change will probably be made in early 2006. Meanwhile, a warning
274 message is given if you do this.
278 If xargs is invoked with many short arguments on PPC systems running
279 the Linux kernel, we no longer get an "argument list too long" error
280 from the operating system.
282 Fixed a bug in the test suite which caused it to spuriously fail on
283 systems where ARG_MAX is different to the value used by the Linux
284 kernel on 32-bit x86-architecture systems.
286 On systems running the Linux kernel, "find -printf %F" no longer
287 produces the wrong answer for files on filesystems that have been
288 remounted elsewhere using "mount --bind". (Savannah bug #14921).
290 ** Documentation Changes
292 Following some extensive and detailed review comments from Aaron
293 Hawley, the material in the manual pages and the Texinfo manual are
296 The %M format specifier of "find -printf" is now documented, although
297 it has existed since release 4.2.5.
299 The 'find' manual page now correctly documents the fact that -regex
300 defaults to using Emacs-style regular expressions (though this can be
303 * Major changes in release 4.2.26
305 ** Public Service Announcements
307 I'd like to point out a second time that the interpretation of '-perm
308 +mode' has changed to be more POSIX-compliant. If you want the old
309 behaviour of the GNU extension you should use '-perm /mode'. See the
310 NEWS entry for findutils version 4.2.21 for details.
312 ** Functional Changes
314 The xargs command now supports a new option (--delimiter) which allows
315 input items to be separated by characters other than null and
316 whitespace. This resolves Savannah support request sr #102914.
318 Sometimes find needs to read the /etc/mtab file (or perform the
319 equivalent operation on systems not using /etc/mtab). If this
320 information is needed but not available, find now exits with an error
321 message non-zero status. If the information is not needed, find will
324 A new xargs option --delimiter allows the input delimiter to be
325 changed (previously \0 was the only choice unless you use the -L
326 option, which changes other semantics too).
330 If the environment size is too large to allow xargs to operate
331 normally, 'xargs --help' still works (now).
333 If the input to xargs is a large number of very short options (for
334 example, one character each), earlier versions of xargs would fail
335 with 'Argument list too long'. However, since this is precisely the
336 problem that xargs was invented to solve, this is a bug. Hence on
337 those systems we now correctly use a shorter command line. This
338 problem particularly affected 64-bit Linux systems because of the
339 larger size of pointers, although 32-bit Linux systems were also
340 affected (albeit for longer command lines). In theory the same
341 problem could affect 'find -exec {} +', but that's much less likely
342 (even so, the bug is fixed there too).
344 Bugfix for an unusual failure mode (Savannah bug #14842) where an
345 attempt to allocate more space for directory contents succeeds but is
346 incorrectly diagnosed as a failure. The likelihood of you
347 experiencing this depends on your architecture, operating system and
348 resource limits. This failure has been observed in a directory
349 containing 35396 entries.
351 ** Documentation Changes
353 The EXAMPLES section of the find manual page now correctly describes
354 the symbolic and octal modes for the -perm test.
356 The documentation and "--help" usage information for the -L, -l, -I
357 and -i options have been clarified (but the behaviour has not changed).
359 The documentation now explains more clearly what happens when you use
362 * Major changes in release 4.2.25
366 find -perm /440 (which should succeed if a file is readable by its
367 owner or group) now works. Previously there was a bug which caused
368 this to be treated as "find -perm 440".
370 Some files in the xargs test suite have been renamed to avoid problems
371 on operating systems whoch cannot distinguish filenames on the basis
372 of upper/lower case distinctions.
374 The software now builds on Cygwin, including the generated file
377 Findutils should now build once again on systems supporting AFS, but
378 this support has not recently been fully tested. Findutils should
379 also (once again) build on Cygwin.
383 The test suite for find is now much more extensive.
385 * Major changes in release 4.2.24
387 ** Documentation Changes
389 The manual now includes a "Worked Examples" section which talks about
390 the various ways in which findutils can be used to perform common
391 tasks, and why some of these alternatives are better than others.
393 The -I option of xargs (which is required by the POSIX standard) is
396 We now document the fact that find ensures that commands run by -ok
397 and -okdir don't steal find's input. Find does this by redirecting
398 the command's standard input from stdin.
400 Many documentation readability enhancements and proofreading fixes
401 were contributed by Aaron Hawley.
403 ** Functional Changes
405 *** Functional changes in locate
407 The "--regex" option of locate now assumes the regular expression to
408 be in the same syntax as is used in GNU Emacs, though this can be
409 changed with the new option --regextype. This is a change from the
410 existing behaviour (which was to use POSIX Basic Regular Expressions).
411 Since this feature is releatively new anyway, I though it was more
412 useful to have compatibility between regular expression handling in
413 find and locate than to maintain the short-lived previous behaviour of
416 The locate program now also supports a "--regextype" long option which
417 controls which regular expression syntax is understood by locate.
418 This is a long option and has no single-letter 'short option'
421 *** Functional changes in find
423 The regular expression syntax understood by "find" can be changed with
424 the -regextype option; this option is positional, meaning that you can
425 have several tests, each using a distinct syntax (this is not
426 recommended practice however).
428 The default regular expression syntax is substantially the same as
429 that recognised by GNU Emacs, except for the fact that "." will match
432 The leaf optimisation can be disabled with the configure option
433 "--disable-leaf-optimisation", which is equivalent to specifying
434 "-noleaf" on all find command lines. This is useful for systems
435 having filesystems which do not provide traditional Unix behaviour for
436 the link count on directories (for example Cygwin and the Solaris 9
437 HSFS implementation).
441 *** Bug Fixes for find
443 The -iregex test now works once again on systems that lack
444 re_search() (that is, systems on which findutils needs to use the
445 gnulib version of this function).
447 find -regex now once again uses GNU Emacs-compatible regular
450 If invoked with stderr closed, the -fprint and -fprintf actions now no
451 longer cause error messages to be sent into the output file.
453 If the link count of a directory is less that two, the leaf
454 optimisation is now disabled for that directory. This should allow
455 searching of non-Unix filesystems to be more reliable on systems that
456 don't take the trouble to make their filesystems look like traditional
457 Unix filesystems. Some filesystems don't even take the trouble to
458 have a link count of less than two and for these, -noleaf is still
459 required unless --disable-leaf-optimisation was used at configure time.
461 The "%Y" directive for the -printf action now no longer changes find's
462 idea of the mode of the file, so this means among other things that
463 "-printf %Y %y" now works properly. This is Savannah bug #13973.
465 * Major changes in release 4.2.23
467 ** Documentation Changes
469 The -L and -I options of xargs are currently incompatible (but should
472 Improved the documentation for -execdir and -okdir.
474 ** Functional Changes to updatedb
476 File names ending in "/" which are specified as an argument to
477 --prunepaths (or in $PRUNEPATHS) don't work, so we now issue an error
478 message if the user tries to do that. The obvious exception of course
479 is "/" which does work and is not rejected.
482 * Major changes in release 4.2.22
486 If a directory entry searched with "find -L" is a symbolic link to
487 ".", we no longer loop indefinitely. This problem affected find
488 versions 4.2.19, 4.2.20 and 4.2.21. This problem allows users to make
489 "find" loop indefinitely. This is in effect a denial of service and
490 could be used to prevent updates to the locate database or to defeat
491 file security checks based on find. However, it should be noted that
492 you should not use "find -L" in security-sensitive scenarios.
496 None in this release.
498 ** Functional Changes to locate
500 A locate database can now be supplied on stdin, using '-' as a element
501 of the database-path. If more than one database-path element is '-',
502 later instances are ignored.
504 A new option to locate, '--all' ('-A') causes matches to be limited to
505 entries which match all given patterns, not entries which match
506 one or more patterns.
508 ** Documentation Changes
510 Some typos in the manual pages have been fixed. Various parts of the
511 manual now point out that it is good practice to quote the argument of
512 "-name". The manpage now has a "NON-BUGS" section which explains some
513 symptoms that look like bugs but aren't. The explanations of the "%k"
514 and "%b" directives to "find -printf" have been imrpoved.
517 * Major changes in release 4.2.21
518 ** Functional Changes to find
520 The GNU extension "find ... -perm +MODE" has been withdrawn because it
521 is incompatible with POSIX in obscure cases like "find ... -perm ++r".
522 Use the new syntax "find ... -perm /MODE" instead. Old usages will
523 still continue to work, so long as they don't conflict with POSIX.
525 If the output is going to a terminal, the -print, -fprint, -printf and
526 -fprintf actions now quote "unusual" characters to prevent unwanted
527 effects on the terminal. See "Unusual Characters in File Names" for
528 further details. There is no change to the behaviour when the output
529 is not going to a terminal. The locate program does the same thing,
530 unless the -0 option is in effect (in which case the filenames are
533 ** Functional Changes to locate
535 The locate command will now read each locate database at most once.
536 This means that if you are using multiple databases and are searching
537 for more than one name, the results will now be printed in a different
538 order (and if you specified a small limit with --limit, you may get a
539 different set of results).
541 A new option '--print' for locate causes it to print the matching
542 results even if the '--count' or '--statistics' option is in effect.
545 find /blah/blah/blah -depth -empty now works once again.
547 The -regex and -iregex tests of find now correctly accept POSIX Basic
548 Regular Expressions. (Savannah bug #12999)
550 The updatedb program now works on systems where "su" does not support
551 the "-s" option, for example Solaris.
553 * Major changes in release 4.2.20
554 ** Internationalization and Localization
555 Updated Vietnamese and Dutch translations.
558 Minor bugfix affecting only those who compile from the CVS repository,
559 as opposed to those who compile from the source releases.
561 * Major changes in release 4.2.19
564 find should now no longer hang on systems which lack the O_NOFOLLOW
565 flag to open(2) and which are clients of an unresponsive NFS server
566 (Savannah bug #12044).
568 We now avoid inappropriately failing for "find -L foo" or "find -H
569 foo" if foo is a symbolic link (Savannah bug #12181). Previously we
570 used to fail with the error message "Too many levels of symbolic
573 "find . -false -exec foo {} +" no longer runs an extra instance of foo
574 when find exits (Savannah bug #12230).
576 If the chdir() safety check fails but we can no longer get back to
577 where we started, exit with an explanatory (fatal) error message.
578 This does not happen on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD because the safety check
579 is not needed (the security problem the safety check protects against
580 is prevented in a cleaner way on those systems).
582 "make distclean" no longer deletes regex.c (which "make all" needs).
584 ** Functionality Changes
585 "find -printf "%h\n" will now print "." for files in the current directory.
586 Previously it printed nothing (but there was a bug in the %h
587 implementation anyway). This fixes Savannah bug #12085.
589 Should now build (again) on non-C99-compliant systems.
591 ** Documentation enhancements
592 Fixed some typos and clarified wording in "Working with automounters".
594 ** Internationalization and Localization
595 New Vietnamese message translation.
597 * Major changes in release 4.2.18
599 *** "find -depth" was missing out non-leaf directories when they contain
600 non-directories. This affected findutils releases 4.2.15,
601 4.2.16 and 4.2.17, but the bug is now fixed.
602 *** Find no longer hangs on systems which are clients of unresponsive
604 ** Documentation improvements
605 *** Improvements and corrections to the find.1 manpage, including corrections to the descriptions of -H and -L.
607 * Major changes in release 4.2.17
609 *** bug #11861 undefined symbol "basename" on IRIX 5.3
610 *** bug #11865 xargs -i regression (as compared to findutils-4.2.12)
611 *** bug #11866 Typo in pred_okdir renders it useless (affecting 4.2.16 only)
612 *** patch #3723 fix recent process_top_path change (for -execdir on /)
613 *** Fixing bug #11866 and applying patch #3723 made -execdir work much better.
614 *** find bar/baz/ugh now works again if baz is a symbolic link (broken
617 * Major changes in release 4.2.16
618 ** Functionality Changes
619 *** Updated the message catalogues for the translated messages.
620 *** The subfs filesystem is now treated the same as the autofs
622 *** New translations: Belarusian, Catalan, Greek, Esperanto,
623 Finnish, Irish, Croatian, Hungarian, Japanese, Luganda,
624 Malay, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian, Chinese (simplified).
627 *** The -execdir action now works correctly for files named on the
630 * Major changes in release 4.2.15
631 ** Functionality Changes
632 *** locate now supports matching regular expression (--regex).
633 *** --enable-d_type-optimization (introduced in findutils 4.2.13) is now turned on by default.
635 * Major changes in release 4.2.14
636 ** Functionality Changes
637 *** New options -L, -P, -H for locate. The work in the same was as the same options for find.
639 *** Don't include the "findutils/find/testsuite/find.gnu" subdirectory in the
640 distributed tar file more than once.
641 *** Should now build on Solaris once again.
642 *** -xtype and -printf %Y now work correctly for symbolic links once again
643 ** Documentation improvements
644 *** All options for "locate" are now documented
646 * Major changes in release 4.2.13
647 ** Performance Enhancements
648 *** On Linux and some other systems, a large performance improvement,
649 because we can eliminate many of the calls to lstat() (in extreme
650 cases, 99% of them). Limited testing shows a 2x speedup on NFS
651 filesystems. Other systems which can make use of this enhancement
652 include Mac OS X and *BSD.
654 * Major changes in release 4.2.12
655 ** Functionality Changes
656 *** find is now POSIX-compliant, as far as I know.
657 *** -exec ... {} + now works.
658 *** New actions -execdir and -okdir which are like -exec and -ok but more secure.
659 *** "locate -w" is now a synonym for "locate --wholepath".
660 *** An empty path entry in the locate database path (for example "::" in
661 $LOCATE_PATH or in the argument to "locate -d") is taken to mean
662 the default database, whose name is hard-coded in locate.
664 *** If find or xargs cannot write to stdout, for example because
665 output is redirected to a file and the disk is full, the
666 relevant program will return a non-zero exit status.
668 * Major changes in release 4.2.11
670 *** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW.
671 *** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a.
672 ** Functionality Changes
673 *** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line,
674 or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce
675 a more helpful error message.
676 *** locate -b is now a synonym for locate --basename
677 *** locate now supports a --statistics (or -S) option, which prints some
678 statistics about the locate databases.
679 *** Implemented the -samefile option.
680 ** Documentation improvements
681 *** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations".
682 *** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to Stepan Kasal)
684 *** locate's options -i and -w now work with the -e option (previously a bug
687 * Major changes in release 4.2.10
689 *** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly
690 also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
693 * Major changes in release 4.2.9
694 ** Functionality Changes
695 *** 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_".
696 *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms
697 for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
700 *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.
701 Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
702 invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
704 *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
705 *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune
706 is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
707 ** Documentation improvements
708 *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime
709 and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
711 * Major changes in release 4.2.8
712 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
713 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
716 * Major changes in release 4.2.7
717 ** Functionality Changes
718 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
719 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
720 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
721 ** Documentation improvements
722 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
723 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
724 are not are explained in this chapter.
726 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
728 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
730 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
731 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
733 * Major changes in release 4.2.6
735 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
736 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
737 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
738 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
741 * Major changes in release 4.2.5
742 ** Functionality Changes
743 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
744 find will follow symbolic links.
745 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
747 ** Documentation improvements
748 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
750 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
751 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
752 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
753 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
754 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
755 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
756 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
758 * Major changes in release 4.2.4
759 ** Functionality Changes
760 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
761 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
763 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
764 doesn't support that much).
765 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
766 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
767 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
768 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
769 by the use of the -nowarn option.
770 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
771 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
772 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
773 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
775 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
776 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
777 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
778 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
779 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
780 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
781 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
782 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
783 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
784 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
785 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
787 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
788 systems that have non-writable string constants.
789 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
790 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
791 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
793 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
795 * Major changes in release 4.2.3
796 ** Functionality Changes
797 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
798 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
799 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
800 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
801 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
802 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
803 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
804 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
805 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
806 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
807 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
808 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
809 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
810 directory we've just returned out of).
812 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
814 * Major changes in release 4.2.2
815 ** Documentation improvements
816 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
818 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
819 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
820 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
822 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
823 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
825 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
826 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
827 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
828 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
830 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
832 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
833 requires it, as explained at
834 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
836 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
838 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
839 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
840 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
841 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
842 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
844 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
846 * Major changes in release 4.2.0
847 ** Functionality Changes
848 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
849 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
850 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
851 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
852 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
853 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
854 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
855 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
856 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
857 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
858 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
859 find stats the file. There is also an option
860 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
861 ** Documentation improvements
862 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
863 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
864 The find manual page also now includes a section
865 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
866 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
867 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
868 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
869 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
870 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
872 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
874 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
875 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
876 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
877 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
878 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
879 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
880 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
881 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
882 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
883 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
884 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
885 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
886 database if it fails.
887 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
888 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
890 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
891 This was broken in 4.1.20.
893 * Major changes in release 4.1.20:
894 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
895 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
897 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
898 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
899 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
900 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
902 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
904 * Major changes in release 4.1.7:
905 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
906 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
908 * Major changes in release 4.1.6:
909 correct bug in prune.
910 added --ignore-case option for locate
912 * Major changes in release 4.1.5:
913 Add support for large files
915 * Major changes in release 4.1.4:
916 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
918 * Major changes in release 4.1.3:
919 added internationalization and localization.
921 * Major changes in release 4.1.1:
922 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
923 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
925 * Major changes in release 4.1:
927 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
928 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
929 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
930 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
932 * Major changes in release 4.0:
936 *** Man page for updatedb.
937 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
940 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
941 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
942 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
943 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
944 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
945 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
948 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
949 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
950 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
951 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
952 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
953 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
955 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
958 *** Takes command-line options.
961 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
962 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
963 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
965 * Major changes in release 3.8:
967 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
968 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
969 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
971 * Major changes in release 3.7:
973 ** locate can search multiple databases
974 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
975 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
978 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
980 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
981 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
982 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
983 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
984 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf