1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
2 * Major changes in release 4.3.2-CVS
6 The slocate database format is now supported. Preliminary changes
7 intended to eventually allow setuid operation have also been made.
8 For the moment, please don't install GNU locate as a set-user-ID
9 program (except for testing purposes; if you do so, please make sure
10 that untrusted users cannot execute the set-user-ID locate program).
12 Use of an slocate database which was built with a nonzero security
13 mode forces locate's "-e" option to be turned on, which has an effect
14 on the "-S" option which is probably surprising for most users.
16 ** Documentation Fixes
18 The global effect of options (other than -daystart and -follow) is now
19 explained more clearly in the manual page. Savannah bug #15360.
22 * Major changes in release 4.3.1
26 Find now follows POSIX rules for determining where directories end and
27 expressions start. This means that "find \(1 \!2 \, \)" now searches
28 in the four named directories, rather than trying to parse an
29 expression. (Savannah bug #15235).
31 You now get a more helpful error message when you use command lines
32 which have missing expressions, such as
39 Savannah bug #15800: If find finds more subdirectories within a parent
40 directory than it previously expected to based on the link count of
41 the parent, the resulting error message now gives the correct
42 directory name (previously an error message was issued but it
43 specified the wrong directory).
45 Savannah bug #16738: "find .... -exec ... {} +" now works if you have
46 a large environment and many files must be passed to the -exec
47 action. The same problem affected the -execdir action, though since
48 the number of files in a given directory will normally be smaller, the
49 problem was worse for -exec.
51 Savannah bug #16579: Updatedb now works if it is running as a user
52 whose login shell is not actually a shell.
54 There have also been a number of documentation improvements (includng
59 For find, debug output can now be enabled at runtime with the -D
60 option. This causes the printing of various sorts of information
61 about find's internal state and progress.
63 The find option -nowarn cannot itself produce a warning (this used to
64 happen with commands like "find . -name quux -nowarn -print".
66 ** Performance Enhancements
68 Find now has a rudimentary cost-based optimiser. It has an idea of
69 the basic cost of each test (i.e. that -name is very cheap while -size
70 is more expensive). It re-orders tests bearing in mind the cost of
71 each test and its likely success. Predicates with side effects (for
72 example -delete or -exec) are not reordered. The optimiser is not
73 yet enabled by default, but the new option -O controls the query
74 optimisation level. To see this in action, try
75 find -D opt -O3 . -type f -o -type c -o -size 555 -name Z
76 and compare the optimised query with:
77 find -D opt -O3 . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
79 find -D opt . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
81 Over time, as optimisations are proven to be robust and correct, they
82 will be moved to lower optimisation levels. Some optimisations have
83 always been performed by find (for example -name is always done early
88 Findutils 4.3.1 includes updated translations for the following
90 Vietnamese, Belarusian, Catalan, Danish, German, Greek, Esperanto,
91 Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Irish, Galician, Croatian, Hungarian,
92 Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Luganda, Malay, Dutch, Polish,
93 Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Kinyarwanda,
94 Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish, Chinese (simplified),
95 Chinese (traditional), Bulgarian
97 * Major changes in release 4.3.0
99 The 4.3.x release series are currently 'development' releases. Please
100 test it, but think carefully before installing it in a production
101 system. New features in findutils-4.3.x are under development; they
102 may change or go away.
104 All changes up to and including findutils-4.2.27 are included in this
105 release. In addition the following changes are new in this release:
107 ** Functional Changes
109 By default, find now uses the fts() function to search the file
110 system. The use of fts greatly increases find's ability to search
111 extremely deep directory hierarchites.
113 You can tell that the version of find you are using uses FTS, because
114 the output of "find --version" will include the word "FTS".
116 Currently two binaries for 'find' are built. The configure option
117 --without-fts can be used to select whether 'find' uses fts:
120 default configuration find oldfind
121 configure --with-fts find oldfind
122 configure --without-fts ftsfind find
124 New tests, -readable, -writable, -executable. These check that a file
125 can be read, written or executed respectively.
127 * Major changes in release 4.2.27
129 ** Warnings of Future Changes
131 The test -perm /000 currently matches no files, but for greater
132 consistency with -perm -000, this will be changed to match all files;
133 this change will probably be made in early 2006. Meanwhile, a warning
134 message is given if you do this.
138 If xargs is invoked with many short arguments on PPC systems running
139 the Linux kernel, we no longer get an "argument list too long" error
140 from the operating system.
142 Fixed a bug in the test suite which caused it to spuriously fail on
143 systems where ARG_MAX is different to the value used by the Linux
144 kernel on 32-bit x86-architecture systems.
146 On systems running the Linux kernel, "find -printf %F" no longer
147 produces the wrong answer for files on filesystems that have been
148 remounted elsewhere using "mount --bind". (Savannah bug #14921).
150 ** Documentation Changes
152 Following some extensive and detailed review comments from Aaron
153 Hawley, the material in the manual pages and the Texinfo manual are
156 The %M format specifier of "find -printf" is now documented, although
157 it has existed since release 4.2.5.
159 The 'find' manual page now correctly documents the fact that -regex
160 defaults to using Emacs-style regular expressions (though this can be
163 * Major changes in release 4.2.26
165 ** Public Service Announcements
167 I'd like to point out a second time that the interpretation of '-perm
168 +mode' has changed to be more POSIX-compliant. If you want the old
169 behaviour of the GNU extension you should use '-perm /mode'. See the
170 NEWS entry for findutils version 4.2.21 for details.
172 ** Functional Changes
174 The xargs command now supports a new option (--delimiter) which allows
175 input items to be separated by characters other than null and
176 whitespace. This resolves Savannah support request sr #102914.
178 Sometimes find needs to read the /etc/mtab file (or perform the
179 equivalent operation on systems not using /etc/mtab). If this
180 information is needed butnot available, find now exits with an error
181 message non-zero status. If the information is not needed, find will
184 A new xargs option --delimiter allows the input delimiter to be
185 changed (previously \0 was the only choice unless you use the -L
186 option, which changes other semantics too).
190 If the environment size is too large to allow xargs to operate
191 normally, 'xargs --help' still works (now).
193 If the input to xargs is a large number of very short options (for
194 example, one character each), earlier versions of xargs would fail
195 with 'Argument list too long'. However, since this is precisely the
196 problem that xargs was invented to solve, this is a bug. Hence on
197 those systems we now correctly use a shorter command line. This
198 problem particularly affected 64-bit Linux systems because of the
199 larger size of pointers, although 32-bit Linux systems were also
200 affected (albeit for longer command lines). In theory the same
201 problem could affect 'find -exec {} +', but that's much less likely
202 (even so, the bug is fixed there too).
204 Bugfix for an unusual failure mode (Savannah bug #14842) where an
205 attempt to allocate more space for directory contents succeeds but is
206 incorrectly diagnosed as a failure. The likelihood of you
207 experiencing this depends on your architecture, operating system and
208 resource limits. This failure has been observed in a directory
209 containing 35396 entries.
211 ** Documentation Changes
213 The EXAMPLES section of the find manual page now correctly describes
214 the symbolic and octal modes for the -perm test.
216 The documentation and "--help" usage information for the -L, -l, -I
217 and -i options have been clarified (but the behaviour has not changed).
219 The documentation now explains more clearly what happens when you use
222 * Major changes in release 4.2.25
226 find -perm /440 (which should succeed if a file is readable by its
227 owner or group) now works. Previously there was a bug which caused
228 this to be treated as "find -perm 440".
230 Some files in the xargs test suite have been renamed to avoid problems
231 on operating systems whoch cannot distinguish filenames on the basis
232 of upper/lower case distinctions.
234 The software now builds on Cygwin, including the generated file
237 Findutils should now build once again on systems supporting AFS, but
238 this support has not recently been fully tested. Findutils should
239 also (once again) build on Cygwin.
243 The test suite for find is now much more extensive.
245 * Major changes in release 4.2.24
247 ** Documentation Changes
249 The manual now includes a "Worked Examples" section which talks about
250 the various ways in which findutils can be used to perform common
251 tasks, and why some of these alternatives are better than others.
253 The -I option of xargs (which is required by the POSIX standard) is
256 We now document the fact that find ensures that commands run by -ok
257 and -okdir don't steal find's input. Find does this by redirecting
258 the command's standard input from stdin.
260 Many documentation readability enhancements and proofreading fixes
261 were contributed by Aaron Hawley.
263 ** Functional Changes
265 *** Functional changes in locate
267 The "--regex" option of locate now assumes the regular expression to
268 be in the same syntax as is used in GNU Emacs, though this can be
269 changed with the new option --regextype. This is a change from the
270 existing behaviour (which was to use POSIX Basic Regular Expressions).
271 Since this feature is releatively new anyway, I though it was more
272 useful to have compatibility between regular expression handling in
273 find and locate than to maintain the short-lived previous behaviour of
276 The locate program now also supports a "--regextype" long option which
277 controls which regular expression syntax is understood by locate.
278 This is a long option and has no single-letter 'short option'
281 *** Functional changes in find
283 The regular expression syntax understood by "find" can be changed with
284 the -regextype option; this option is positional, meaning that you can
285 have several tests, each using a distinct syntax (this is not
286 recommended practice however).
288 The default regular expression syntax is substantially the same as
289 that recognised by GNU Emacs, except for the fact that "." will match
292 The leaf optimisation can be disabled with the configure option
293 "--disable-leaf-optimisation", which is equivalent to specifying
294 "-noleaf" on all find command lines. This is useful for systems
295 having filesystems which do not provide traditional Unix behaviour for
296 the link count on directories (for example Cygwin and the Solaris 9
297 HSFS implementation).
301 *** Bug Fixes for find
303 The -iregex test now works once again on systems that lack
304 re_search() (that is, systems on which findutils needs to use the
305 gnulib version of this function).
307 find -regex now once again uses GNU Emacs-compatible regular
310 If invoked with stderr closed, the -fprint and -fprintf actions now no
311 longer cause error messages to be sent into the output file.
313 If the link count of a directory is less that two, the leaf
314 optimisation is now disabled for that directory. This should allow
315 searching of non-Unix filesystems to be more reliable on systems that
316 don't take the trouble to make their filesystems look like traditional
317 Unix filesystems. Some filesystems don't even take the trouble to
318 have a link count of less than two and for these, -noleaf is still
319 required unless --disable-leaf-optimisation was used at configure time.
321 The "%Y" directive for the -printf action now no longer changes find's
322 idea of the mode of the file, so this means among other things that
323 "-printf %Y %y" now works properly. This is Savannah bug #13973.
325 * Major changes in release 4.2.23
327 ** Documentation Changes
329 The -L and -I options of xargs are currently incompatible (but should
332 Improved the documentation for -execdir and -okdir.
334 ** Functional Changes to updatedb
336 File names ending in "/" which are specified as an argument to
337 --prunepaths (or in $PRUNEPATHS) don't work, so we now issue an error
338 message if the user tries to do that. The obvious exception of course
339 is "/" which does work and is not rejected.
342 * Major changes in release 4.2.22
346 If a directory entry searched with "find -L" is a symbolic link to
347 ".", we no longer loop indefinitely. This problem affected find
348 versions 4.2.19, 4.2.20 and 4.2.21. This problem allows users to make
349 "find" loop indefinitely. This is in effect a denial of service and
350 could be used to prevent updates to the locate database or to defeat
351 file security checks based on find. However, it should be noted that
352 you should not use "find -L" in security-sensitive scenarios.
356 None in this release.
358 ** Functional Changes to locate
360 A locate database can now be supplied on stdin, using '-' as a element
361 of the database-path. If more than one database-path element is '-',
362 later instances are ignored.
364 A new option to locate, '--all' ('-A') causes matches to be limited to
365 entries which match all given patterns, not entries which match
366 one or more patterns.
368 ** Documentation Changes
370 Some typos in the manual pages have been fixed. Various parts of the
371 manual now point out that it is good practice to quote the argument of
372 "-name". The manpage now has a "NON-BUGS" section which explains some
373 symptoms that look like bugs but aren't. The explanations of the "%k"
374 and "%b" directives to "find -printf" have been imrpoved.
377 * Major changes in release 4.2.21
378 ** Functional Changes to find
380 The GNU extension "find ... -perm +MODE" has been withdrawn because it
381 is incompatible with POSIX in obscure cases like "find ... -perm ++r".
382 Use the new syntax "find ... -perm /MODE" instead. Old usages will
383 still continue to work, so long as they don't conflict with POSIX.
385 If the output is going to a terminal, the -print, -fprint, -printf and
386 -fprintf actions now quote "unusual" characters to prevent unwanted
387 effects on the terminal. See "Unusual Characters in File Names" for
388 further details. There is no change to the behaviour when the output
389 is not going to a terminal. The locate program does the same thing,
390 unless the -0 option is in effect (in which case the filenames are
393 ** Functional Changes to locate
395 The locate command will now read each locate database at most once.
396 This means that if you are using multiple databases and are searching
397 for more than one name, the results will now be printed in a different
398 order (and if you specified a small limit with --limit, you may get a
399 different set of results).
401 A new option '--print' for locate causes it to print the matching
402 results even if the '--count' or '--statistics' option is in effect.
405 find /blah/blah/blah -depth -empty now works once again.
407 The -regex and -iregex tests of find now correctly accept POSIX Basic
408 Regular Expressions. (Savannah bug #12999)
410 The updatedb program now works on systems where "su" does not support
411 the "-s" option, for example Solaris.
413 * Major changes in release 4.2.20
414 ** Internationalization and Localization
415 Updated Vietnamese and Dutch translations.
418 Minor bugfix affecting only those who compile from the CVS repository,
419 as opposed to those who compile from the source releases.
421 * Major changes in release 4.2.19
424 find should now no longer hang on systems which lack the O_NOFOLLOW
425 flag to open(2) and which are clients of an unresponsive NFS server
426 (Savannah bug #12044).
428 We now avoid inappropriately failing for "find -L foo" or "find -H
429 foo" if foo is a symbolic link (Savannah bug #12181). Previously we
430 used to fail with the error message "Too many levels of symbolic
433 "find . -false -exec foo {} +" no longer runs an extra instance of foo
434 when find exits (Savannah bug #12230).
436 If the chdir() safety check fails but we can no longer get back to
437 where we started, exit with an explanatory (fatal) error message.
438 This does not happen on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD because the safety check
439 is not needed (the security problem the safety check protects against
440 is prevented in a cleaner way on those systems).
442 "make distclean" no longer deletes regex.c (which "make all" needs).
444 ** Functionality Changes
445 "find -printf "%h\n" will now print "." for files in the current directory.
446 Previously it printed nothing (but there was a bug in the %h
447 implementation anyway). This fixes Savannah bug #12085.
449 Should now build (again) on non-C99-compliant systems.
451 ** Documentation enhancements
452 Fixed some typos and clarified wording in "Working with automounters".
454 ** Internationalization and Localization
455 New Vietnamese message translation.
457 * Major changes in release 4.2.18
459 *** "find -depth" was missing out non-leaf directories when they contain
460 non-directories. This affected findutils releases 4.2.15,
461 4.2.16 and 4.2.17, but the bug is now fixed.
462 *** Find no longer hangs on systems which are clients of unresponsive
464 ** Documentation improvements
465 *** Improvements and corrections to the find.1 manpage, including corrections to the descriptions of -H and -L.
467 * Major changes in release 4.2.17
469 *** bug #11861 undefined symbol "basename" on IRIX 5.3
470 *** bug #11865 xargs -i regression (as compared to findutils-4.2.12)
471 *** bug #11866 Typo in pred_okdir renders it useless (affecting 4.2.16 only)
472 *** patch #3723 fix recent process_top_path change (for -execdir on /)
473 *** Fixing bug #11866 and applying patch #3723 made -execdir work much better.
474 *** find bar/baz/ugh now works again if baz is a symbolic link (broken
477 * Major changes in release 4.2.16
478 ** Functionality Changes
479 *** Updated the message catalogues for the translated messages.
480 *** The subfs filesystem is now treated the same as the autofs
482 *** New translations: Belarusian, Catalan, Greek, Esperanto,
483 Finnish, Irish, Croatian, Hungarian, Japanese, Luganda,
484 Malay, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian, Chinese (simplified).
487 *** The -execdir action now works correctly for files named on the
490 * Major changes in release 4.2.15
491 ** Functionality Changes
492 *** locate now supports matching regular expression (--regex).
493 *** --enable-d_type-optimization (introduced in findutils 4.2.13) is now turned on by default.
495 * Major changes in release 4.2.14
496 ** Functionality Changes
497 *** New options -L, -P, -H for locate. The work in the same was as the same options for find.
499 *** Don't include the "findutils/find/testsuite/find.gnu" subdirectory in the
500 distributed tar file more than once.
501 *** Should now build on Solaris once again.
502 *** -xtype and -printf %Y now work correctly for symbolic links once again
503 ** Documentation improvements
504 *** All options for "locate" are now documented
506 * Major changes in release 4.2.13
507 ** Performance Enhancements
508 *** On Linux and some other systems, a large performance improvement,
509 because we can eliminate many of the calls to lstat() (in extreme
510 cases, 99% of them). Limited testing shows a 2x speedup on NFS
511 filesystems. Other systems which can make use of this enhancement
512 include Mac OS X and *BSD.
514 * Major changes in release 4.2.12
515 ** Functionality Changes
516 *** find is now POSIX-compliant, as far as I know.
517 *** -exec ... {} + now works.
518 *** New actions -execdir and -okdir which are like -exec and -ok but more secure.
519 *** "locate -w" is now a synonym for "locate --wholepath".
520 *** An empty path entry in the locate database path (for example "::" in
521 $LOCATE_PATH or in the argument to "locate -d") is taken to mean
522 the default database, whose name is hard-coded in locate.
524 *** If find or xargs cannot write to stdout, for example because
525 output is redirected to a file and the disk is full, the
526 relevant program will return a non-zero exit status.
528 * Major changes in release 4.2.11
530 *** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW.
531 *** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a.
532 ** Functionality Changes
533 *** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line,
534 or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce
535 a more helpful error message.
536 *** locate -b is now a synonym for locate --basename
537 *** locate now supports a --statistics (or -S) option, which prints some
538 statistics about the locate databases.
539 *** Implemented the -samefile option.
540 ** Documentation improvements
541 *** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations".
542 *** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to Stepan Kasal)
544 *** locate's options -i and -w now work with the -e option (previously a bug
547 * Major changes in release 4.2.10
549 *** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly
550 also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
553 * Major changes in release 4.2.9
554 ** Functionality Changes
555 *** 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_".
556 *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms
557 for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
560 *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.
561 Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
562 invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
564 *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
565 *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune
566 is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
567 ** Documentation improvements
568 *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime
569 and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
571 * Major changes in release 4.2.8
572 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
573 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
576 * Major changes in release 4.2.7
577 ** Functionality Changes
578 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
579 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
580 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
581 ** Documentation improvements
582 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
583 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
584 are not are explained in this chapter.
586 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
588 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
590 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
591 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
593 * Major changes in release 4.2.6
595 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
596 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
597 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
598 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
601 * Major changes in release 4.2.5
602 ** Functionality Changes
603 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
604 find will follow symbolic links.
605 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
607 ** Documentation improvements
608 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
610 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
611 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
612 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
613 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
614 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
615 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
616 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
618 * Major changes in release 4.2.4
619 ** Functionality Changes
620 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
621 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
623 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
624 doesn't support that much).
625 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
626 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
627 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
628 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
629 by the use of the -nowarn option.
630 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
631 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
632 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
633 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
635 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
636 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
637 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
638 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
639 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
640 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
641 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
642 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
643 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
644 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
645 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
647 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
648 systems that have non-writable string constants.
649 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
650 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
651 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
653 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
655 * Major changes in release 4.2.3
656 ** Functionality Changes
657 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
658 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
659 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
660 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
661 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
662 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
663 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
664 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
665 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
666 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
667 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
668 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
669 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
670 directory we've just returned out of).
672 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
674 * Major changes in release 4.2.2
675 ** Documentation improvements
676 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
678 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
679 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
680 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
682 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
683 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
685 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
686 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
687 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
688 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
690 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
692 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
693 requires it, as explained at
694 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
696 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
698 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
699 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
700 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
701 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
702 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
704 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
706 * Major changes in release 4.2.0
707 ** Functionality Changes
708 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
709 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
710 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
711 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
712 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
713 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
714 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
715 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
716 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
717 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
718 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
719 find stats the file. There is also an option
720 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
721 ** Documentation improvements
722 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
723 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
724 The find manual page also now includes a section
725 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
726 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
727 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
728 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
729 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
730 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
732 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
734 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
735 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
736 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
737 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
738 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
739 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
740 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
741 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
742 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
743 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
744 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
745 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
746 database if it fails.
747 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
748 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
750 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
751 This was broken in 4.1.20.
753 * Major changes in release 4.1.20:
754 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
755 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
757 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
758 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
759 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
760 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
762 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
764 * Major changes in release 4.1.7:
765 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
766 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
768 * Major changes in release 4.1.6:
769 correct bug in prune.
770 added --ignore-case option for locate
772 * Major changes in release 4.1.5:
773 Add support for large files
775 * Major changes in release 4.1.4:
776 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
778 * Major changes in release 4.1.3:
779 added internationalization and localization.
781 * Major changes in release 4.1.1:
782 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
783 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
785 * Major changes in release 4.1:
787 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
788 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
789 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
790 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
792 * Major changes in release 4.0:
796 *** Man page for updatedb.
797 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
800 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
801 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
802 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
803 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
804 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
805 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
808 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
809 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
810 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
811 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
812 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
813 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
815 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
818 *** Takes command-line options.
821 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
822 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
823 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
825 * Major changes in release 3.8:
827 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
828 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
829 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
831 * Major changes in release 3.7:
833 ** locate can search multiple databases
834 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
835 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
838 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
840 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
841 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
842 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
843 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
844 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf