1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
2 * Major changes in release 4.3.0-CVS
4 * Major changes in release 4.2.23
6 ** Documentation Changes
8 The -L and -I options of xargs are currently incompatible (but should
11 Improved the documentation for -execdir and -okdir.
13 ** Functional Changes to updatedb
15 File names ending in "/" which are specified as an argument to
16 --prunepaths (or in $PRUNEPATHS) don't work, so we now issue an error
17 message if the user tries to do that. The obvious exception of course
18 is "/" which does work and is not rejected.
21 * Major changes in release 4.2.22
25 If a directory entry searched with "find -L" is a symbolic link to
26 ".", we no longer loop indefinitely. This problem affected find
27 versions 4.2.19, 4.2.20 and 4.2.21. This problem allows users to make
28 "find" loop indefinitely. This is in effect a denial of service and
29 could be used to prevent updates to the locate database or to defeat
30 file security checks based on find. However, it should be noted that
31 you should not use "find -L" in security-sensitive scenarios.
37 ** Functional Changes to locate
39 A locate database can now be supplied on stdin, using '-' as a element
40 of the database-path. If more than one database-path element is '-',
41 later instances are ignored.
43 A new option to locate, '--all' ('-A') causes matches to be limited to
44 entries which match all given patterns, not entries which match
47 ** Documentation Changes
49 Some typos in the manual pages have been fixed. Various parts of the
50 manual now point out that it is good practice to quote the argument of
51 "-name". The manpage now has a "NON-BUGS" section which explains some
52 symptoms that look like bugs but aren't. The explanations of the "%k"
53 and "%b" directives to "find -printf" have been imrpoved.
56 * Major changes in release 4.2.21
57 ** Functional Changes to find
59 The GNU extension "find ... -perm +MODE" has been withdrawn because it
60 is incompatible with POSIX in obscure cases like "find ... -perm ++r".
61 Use the new syntax "find ... -perm /MODE" instead. Old usages will
62 still continue to work, so long as they don't conflict with POSIX.
64 If the output is going to a terminal, the -print, -fprint, -printf and
65 -fprintf actions now quote "unusual" characters to prevent unwanted
66 effects on the terminal. See "Unusual Characters in File Names" for
67 further details. There is no change to the behaviour when the output
68 is not going to a terminal. The locate program does the same thing,
69 unless the -0 option is in effect (in which case the filenames are
72 ** Functional Changes to locate
74 The locate command will now read each locate database at most once.
75 This means that if you are using multiple databases and are searching
76 for more than one name, the results will now be printed in a different
77 order (and if you specified a small limit with --limit, you may get a
78 different set of results).
80 A new option '--print' for locate causes it to print the matching
81 results even if the '--count' or '--statistics' option is in effect.
84 find /blah/blah/blah -depth -empty now works once again.
86 The -regex and -iregex tests of find now correctly accept POSIX Basic
87 Regular Expressions. (Savannah bug #12999)
89 The updatedb program now works on systems where "su" does not support
90 the "-s" option, for example Solaris.
92 * Major changes in release 4.2.20
93 ** Internationalization and Localization
94 Updated Vietnamese and Dutch translations.
97 Minor bugfix affecting only those who compile from the CVS repository,
98 as opposed to those who compile from the source releases.
100 * Major changes in release 4.2.19
103 find should now no longer hang on systems which lack the O_NOFOLLOW
104 flag to open(2) and which are clients of an unresponsive NFS server
105 (Savannah bug #12044).
107 We now avoid inappropriately failing for "find -L foo" or "find -H
108 foo" if foo is a symbolic link (Savannah bug #12181). Previously we
109 used to fail with the error message "Too many levels of symbolic
112 "find . -false -exec foo {} +" no longer runs an extra instance of foo
113 when find exits (Savannah bug #12230).
115 If the chdir() safety check fails but we can no longer get back to
116 where we started, exit with an explanatory (fatal) error message.
117 This does not happen on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD because the safety check
118 is not needed (the security problem the safety check protects against
119 is prevented in a cleaner way on those systems).
121 "make distclean" no longer deletes regex.c (which "make all" needs).
123 ** Functionality Changes
124 "find -printf "%h\n" will now print "." for files in the current directory.
125 Previously it printed nothing (but there was a bug in the %h
126 implementation anyway). This fixes Savannah bug #12085.
128 Should now build (again) on non-C99-compliant systems.
130 ** Documentation enhancements
131 Fixed some typos and clarified wording in "Working with automounters".
133 ** Internationalization and Localization
134 New Vietnamese message translation.
136 * Major changes in release 4.2.18
138 *** "find -depth" was missing out non-leaf directories when they contain
139 non-directories. This affected findutils releases 4.2.15,
140 4.2.16 and 4.2.17, but the bug is now fixed.
141 *** Find no longer hangs on systems which are clients of unresponsive
143 ** Documentation improvements
144 *** Improvements and corrections to the find.1 manpage, including corrections to the descriptions of -H and -L.
146 * Major changes in release 4.2.17
148 *** bug #11861 undefined symbol "basename" on IRIX 5.3
149 *** bug #11865 xargs -i regression (as compared to findutils-4.2.12)
150 *** bug #11866 Typo in pred_okdir renders it useless (affecting 4.2.16 only)
151 *** patch #3723 fix recent process_top_path change (for -execdir on /)
152 *** Fixing bug #11866 and applying patch #3723 made -execdir work much better.
153 *** find bar/baz/ugh now works again if baz is a symbolic link (broken
156 * Major changes in release 4.2.16
157 ** Functionality Changes
158 *** Updated the message catalogues for the translated messages.
159 *** The subfs filesystem is now treated the same as the autofs
161 *** New translations: Belarusian, Catalan, Greek, Esperanto,
162 Finnish, Irish, Croatian, Hungarian, Japanese, Luganda,
163 Malay, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian, Chinese (simplified).
166 *** The -execdir action now works correctly for files named on the
169 * Major changes in release 4.2.15
170 ** Functionality Changes
171 *** locate now supports matching regular expression (--regex).
172 *** --enable-d_type-optimization (introduced in findutils 4.2.13) is now turned on by default.
174 * Major changes in release 4.2.14
175 ** Functionality Changes
176 *** New options -L, -P, -H for locate. The work in the same was as the same options for find.
178 *** Don't include the "findutils/find/testsuite/find.gnu" subdirectory in the
179 distributed tar file more than once.
180 *** Should now build on Solaris once again.
181 *** -xtype and -printf %Y now work correctly for symbolic links once again
182 ** Documentation improvements
183 *** All options for "locate" are now documented
185 * Major changes in release 4.2.13
186 ** Performance Enhancements
187 *** On Linux and some other systems, a large performance improvement,
188 because we can eliminate many of the calls to lstat() (in extreme
189 cases, 99% of them). Limited testing shows a 2x speedup on NFS
190 filesystems. Other systems which can make use of this enhancement
191 include Mac OS X and *BSD.
193 * Major changes in release 4.2.12
194 ** Functionality Changes
195 *** find is now POSIX-compliant, as far as I know.
196 *** -exec ... {} + now works.
197 *** New actions -execdir and -okdir which are like -exec and -ok but more secure.
198 *** "locate -w" is now a synonym for "locate --wholepath".
199 *** An empty path entry in the locate database path (for example "::" in
200 $LOCATE_PATH or in the argument to "locate -d") is taken to mean
201 the default database, whose name is hard-coded in locate.
203 *** If find or xargs cannot write to stdout, for example because
204 output is redirected to a file and the disk is full, the
205 relevant program will return a non-zero exit status.
207 * Major changes in release 4.2.11
209 *** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW.
210 *** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a.
211 ** Functionality Changes
212 *** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line,
213 or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce
214 a more helpful error message.
215 *** locate -b is now a synonym for locate --basename
216 *** locate now supports a --statistics (or -S) option, which prints some
217 statistics about the locate databases.
218 *** Implemented the -samefile option.
219 ** Documentation improvements
220 *** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations".
221 *** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to Stepan Kasal)
223 *** locate's options -i and -w now work with the -e option (previously a bug
226 * Major changes in release 4.2.10
228 *** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly
229 also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
232 * Major changes in release 4.2.9
233 ** Functionality Changes
234 *** 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_".
235 *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms
236 for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
239 *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.
240 Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
241 invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
243 *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
244 *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune
245 is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
246 ** Documentation improvements
247 *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime
248 and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
250 * Major changes in release 4.2.8
251 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
252 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
255 * Major changes in release 4.2.7
256 ** Functionality Changes
257 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
258 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
259 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
260 ** Documentation improvements
261 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
262 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
263 are not are explained in this chapter.
265 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
267 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
269 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
270 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
272 * Major changes in release 4.2.6
274 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
275 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
276 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
277 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
280 * Major changes in release 4.2.5
281 ** Functionality Changes
282 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
283 find will follow symbolic links.
284 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
286 ** Documentation improvements
287 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
289 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
290 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
291 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
292 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
293 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
294 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
295 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
297 * Major changes in release 4.2.4
298 ** Functionality Changes
299 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
300 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
302 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
303 doesn't support that much).
304 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
305 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
306 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
307 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
308 by the use of the -nowarn option.
309 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
310 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
311 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
312 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
314 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
315 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
316 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
317 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
318 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
319 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
320 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
321 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
322 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
323 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
324 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
326 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
327 systems that have non-writable string constants.
328 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
329 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
330 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
332 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
334 * Major changes in release 4.2.3
335 ** Functionality Changes
336 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
337 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
338 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
339 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
340 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
341 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
342 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
343 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
344 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
345 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
346 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
347 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
348 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
349 directory we've just returned out of).
351 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
353 * Major changes in release 4.2.2
354 ** Documentation improvements
355 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
357 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
358 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
359 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
361 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
362 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
364 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
365 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
366 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
367 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
369 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
371 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
372 requires it, as explained at
373 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
375 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
377 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
378 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
379 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
380 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
381 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
383 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
385 * Major changes in release 4.2.0
386 ** Functionality Changes
387 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
388 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
389 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
390 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
391 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
392 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
393 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
394 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
395 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
396 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
397 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
398 find stats the file. There is also an option
399 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
400 ** Documentation improvements
401 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
402 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
403 The find manual page also now includes a section
404 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
405 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
406 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
407 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
408 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
409 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
411 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
413 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
414 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
415 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
416 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
417 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
418 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
419 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
420 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
421 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
422 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
423 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
424 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
425 database if it fails.
426 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
427 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
429 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
430 This was broken in 4.1.20.
432 * Major changes in release 4.1.20:
433 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
434 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
436 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
437 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
438 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
439 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
441 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
443 * Major changes in release 4.1.7:
444 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
445 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
447 * Major changes in release 4.1.6:
448 correct bug in prune.
449 added --ignore-case option for locate
451 * Major changes in release 4.1.5:
452 Add support for large files
454 * Major changes in release 4.1.4:
455 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
457 * Major changes in release 4.1.3:
458 added internationalization and localization.
460 * Major changes in release 4.1.1:
461 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
462 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
464 * Major changes in release 4.1:
466 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
467 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
468 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
469 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
471 * Major changes in release 4.0:
475 *** Man page for updatedb.
476 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
479 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
480 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
481 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
482 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
483 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
484 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
487 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
488 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
489 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
490 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
491 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
492 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
494 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
497 *** Takes command-line options.
500 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
501 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
502 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
504 * Major changes in release 3.8:
506 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
507 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
508 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
510 * Major changes in release 3.7:
512 ** locate can search multiple databases
513 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
514 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
517 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
519 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
520 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
521 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
522 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
523 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf