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1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
3 * Major changes in release 4.2.13
4 ** Performance Enhancements
5 *** On Linux and some other systems, a large performance improvement,
6 because we can eliminate many of the calls to lstat() (in extreme
7 cases, 99% of them). Limited testing shows a 2x speedup on NFS
8 filesystems. Other systems which can make use of this enhancement
9 include Mac OS X and *BSD.
11 * Major changes in release 4.2.12
12 ** Functionality Changes
13 *** find is now POSIX-compliant, as far as I know.
14 *** -exec ... {} + now works.
15 *** New actions -execdir and -okdir which are like -exec and -ok but more secure.
16 *** "locate -w" is now a synonym for "locate --wholepath".
17 *** An empty path entry in the locate database path (for example "::" in
18 $LOCATE_PATH or in the argument to "locate -d") is taken to mean
19 the default database, whose name is hard-coded in locate.
20 ** Bug Fixes
21 *** If find or xargs cannot write to stdout, for example because
22 output is redirected to a file and the disk is full, the
23 relevant program will return a non-zero exit status.
25 * Major changes in release 4.2.11
26 ** Bug Fixes
27 *** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW.
28 *** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a.
29 ** Functionality Changes
30 *** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line,
31 or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce
32 a more helpful error message.
33 *** locate -b is now a synonym for locate --basename
34 *** locate now supports a --statistics (or -S) option, which prints some
35 statistics about the locate databases.
36 *** Implemented the -samefile option.
37 ** Documentation improvements
38 *** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations".
39 *** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to Stepan Kasal)
40 ** Bug Fixes
41 *** locate's options -i and -w now work with the -e option (previously a bug
42 prevented this).
44 * Major changes in release 4.2.10
45 ** Bug Fixes
46 *** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly
47 also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
48 systems too.
50 * Major changes in release 4.2.9
51 ** Functionality Changes
52 *** 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_".
53 *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms
54 for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
55 now deprecated.
56 ** Bug Fixes
57 *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.
58 Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
59 invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
60 for next time.
61 *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
62 *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune
63 is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
64 ** Documentation improvements
65 *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime
66 and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
68 * Major changes in release 4.2.8
69 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
70 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
71 findutils-4.2.8.
73 * Major changes in release 4.2.7
74 ** Functionality Changes
75 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
76 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
77 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
78 ** Documentation improvements
79 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
80 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
81 are not are explained in this chapter.
82 ** Bug Fixes
83 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
84 have it.
85 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
86 on Solaris).
87 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
88 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
90 * Major changes in release 4.2.6
91 ** Bug Fixes
92 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
93 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
94 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
95 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
96 #9043.
98 * Major changes in release 4.2.5
99 ** Functionality Changes
100 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
101 find will follow symbolic links.
102 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
103 it is the default).
104 ** Documentation improvements
105 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
106 ** Bug Fixes
107 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
108 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
109 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
110 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
111 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
112 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
113 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
115 * Major changes in release 4.2.4
116 ** Functionality Changes
117 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
118 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
119 locate).
120 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
121 doesn't support that much).
122 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
123 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
124 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
125 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
126 by the use of the -nowarn option.
127 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
128 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
129 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
130 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
131 grep -c).
132 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
133 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
134 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
135 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
136 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
137 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
138 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
139 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
140 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
141 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
142 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
143 ** Bug Fixes
144 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
145 systems that have non-writable string constants.
146 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
147 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
148 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
149 value).
150 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
152 * Major changes in release 4.2.3
153 ** Functionality Changes
154 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
155 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
156 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
157 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
158 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
159 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
160 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
161 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
162 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
163 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
164 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
165 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
166 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
167 directory we've just returned out of).
168 ** Other Changes
169 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
171 * Major changes in release 4.2.2
172 ** Documentation improvements
173 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
174 ** Bug Fixes
175 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
176 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
177 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
178 ** Other Changes
179 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
180 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
181 now.
182 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
183 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
184 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
185 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
187 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
188 ** Bug Fixes
189 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
190 requires it, as explained at
191 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
193 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
194 ** Bug Fixes
195 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
196 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
197 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
198 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
199 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
200 ** Other Changes
201 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
203 * Major changes in release 4.2.0
204 ** Functionality Changes
205 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
206 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
207 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
208 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
209 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
210 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
211 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
212 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
213 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
214 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
215 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
216 find stats the file. There is also an option
217 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
218 ** Documentation improvements
219 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
220 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
221 The find manual page also now includes a section
222 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
223 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
224 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
225 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
226 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
227 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
228 has been improved.
229 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
230 ** Bug Fixes
231 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
232 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
233 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
234 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
235 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
236 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
237 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
238 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
239 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
240 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
241 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
242 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
243 database if it fails.
244 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
245 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
246 locate database.
247 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
248 This was broken in 4.1.20.
250 * Major changes in release 4.1.20:
251 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
252 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
253 a gap just in case.
254 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
255 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
256 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
257 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
258 README-CVS).
259 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
261 * Major changes in release 4.1.7:
262 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
263 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
265 * Major changes in release 4.1.6:
266 correct bug in prune.
267 added --ignore-case option for locate
269 * Major changes in release 4.1.5:
270 Add support for large files
272 * Major changes in release 4.1.4:
273 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
275 * Major changes in release 4.1.3:
276 added internationalization and localization.
278 * Major changes in release 4.1.1:
279 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
280 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
282 * Major changes in release 4.1:
284 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
285 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
286 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
287 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
288 \f
289 * Major changes in release 4.0:
291 ** Documentation:
292 *** Texinfo manual.
293 *** Man page for updatedb.
294 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
296 ** find:
297 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
298 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
299 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
300 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
301 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
302 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
304 ** locate:
305 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
306 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
307 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
308 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
309 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
310 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
311 some systems.
312 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
314 ** updatedb:
315 *** Takes command-line options.
317 ** xargs:
318 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
319 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
320 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
321 \f
322 * Major changes in release 3.8:
324 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
325 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
326 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
327 \f
328 * Major changes in release 3.7:
330 ** locate can search multiple databases
331 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
332 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
334 --//--
335 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
337 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
338 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
339 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
340 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
341 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf