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