1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
2 * Major changes in release 4.3.4
6 #19634: Test suite now passes (again) if "." is on your $PATH.
8 #19619: Findutils builds once again on Cygwin.
10 #19617: Nonexistent start points are (once again) diagnosed in
11 ftsfind. This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3.
13 #19616: Fix leaf optimisation and loop detection (which were
14 unreliable in findutils 4.3.3). This bug affected only
17 #19615: find --version no longer claims to be using FTS_CWDFD when it
18 isn't. This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3.
20 #19613: "find -L . -type f" no longer causes an assertion failure when
21 it encounters a symbolic link loop. This bug affected only
24 #19605: Issue an error message (and later return nonzero exit status)
25 if a symbolic link loop was encountered during directory traversal.
27 #19484: bigram.c and code.c fail if the first pathname recorded begins
30 #19483: Inconsistent option highlighting in updatedb manpage
32 #18414: Tests for "find -readable" are skipped for the superuser, as
33 on some systems (e.g. Cygwin with an Administrative user) users can
38 Findutils 4.3.4 includes a translation for the Ukranian language.
41 * Major changes in release 4.3.3
43 Fiundutils-4.3.3 was released on 2007-04-15.
47 #19596: Correct the comparison in the find manpage between %b and %s
48 (the divisor is 512 not 1024).
50 #18714: In the POSIX locale, vertical tabs and form feeds are not
53 #18713: Quoted but empty arguments which occur last on an xargs input
54 line are no longer ignored, but instead produce an empty argument.
56 #18554: Documented the construct -exec sh -c 'foo "$@" bar' {} +
58 #18466: we now avoid this bug by limiting "-execdir ...+"
59 to just one argument for the time being. There is a performance
60 penalty for doing this. We hope to make a better fix in a later
63 #18384: excess bracket in xargs --help
65 #18320: Zero bytes in input should give warning
67 #17437: Corrected the handling of X in symbolic permissions (such
68 as-u+w,a+X). This change actually occurred in findutils-4.3.2, but
69 the NEWS file for that release didn't mention it.
71 #17396: find -mtime -atime -ctime does not support fractional part
72 (see "Functional changes" below)
74 #14748: find -perm /zzz gives wrong result when zzz evaluates to an
77 #14535: correctly support case-folding in locate (that is, "locate
78 -i") for multibyte character environments such as UTF-8. Previously,
79 if your search string contained a character which was outside the
80 single-byte-encoding range for UTF-8 for example, then the
81 case-folding behaviour failed to work and only exact matches would be
88 The -printf action (and similar related actions) now support %S,
89 which is a measurement of the sparseness of a file.
91 The test "-perm /000" now matches all files instead of no files. For
92 over a year find has been issuing warning messages indicating that
93 this change will happen. We now issue a warning indicating that the
94 change has already happened (in 4.3.x only, there is no plan to make
95 this change in the 4.2.x series).
97 The tests -newer, -anewer, -cnewer, -mtime, -atime, -ctime, -amin,
98 -cmin, -mmin and -used now support sub-second timestamps, including
99 the ability to specify times with non-integer arguments.
101 The -printf format specifiers also support sub-second timestamps:
110 The new test -newerXY supports comparison between status times for
111 files. One of the status times for a file being considered (denoted
112 X) is checked against a reference time (denoted Y) for the file whose
113 name id the argument. X and Y can be:
116 B Birth time (st_birthtime, currently unsupported)
119 t Valid only for the reference time; instead of comparison
120 against a file status time, the argument is a time string.
123 For example, -newermm is equivalent to -newer, and -neweram is true if
124 the file being considered was accessed more recently than the
125 reference file was modified. The -newerXY test supports subsecond
126 timestamps where these are available. The X=B variant is not yet
129 If you configure the sourec code and then run the tests with "make
130 check", the test suite fails rather than defaulting to testing the
134 * Major changes in release 4.3.2
138 #18222: find -printf '%H %P' once again prints the right result if
139 more than one start point was given on the command line.
141 #17782: find -execdir now correctly puts the prefix "./" before the
142 expansion of "{}" rather than at the start of the argument it appears
143 in. Please note that if you use the -exec or -execdir actions with a
144 shell, then you may be vulnerable to shell code injection attacks, so
145 don't do that. It's not a security defect in find - you should not be
146 passing untrusted data (such as file names chosen by other people) to
149 #17490: find -regex generated a segfault in findutils-4.3.1, but this
150 is fixed in findutils-4.3.2.
152 #17477: find -printf '%' (that is, where the format has a trailing %)
153 now generates an error message.
155 #17372: The fts-based find executable (the default configuration uses
156 fts) is now much faster when -maxdepth is used on filesystems with
159 #15531: The -prune action now behaves correctly when applied to a file.
161 ** Functional changes
163 The slocate database format is now supported. Preliminary changes
164 intended to eventually allow setuid operation of locate have also been
165 made. For the moment, please don't install GNU locate as a
166 set-user-ID program (except for testing purposes; if you do so, please
167 make sure that untrusted users cannot execute the set-user-ID locate
170 Use of an slocate database which was built with a nonzero security
171 mode (at the moment, GNU updatedb will not do this) forces locate's
172 "-e" option to be turned on, which has an effect on the "-S" option
173 which is probably surprising for most users.
176 ** Documentation Fixes
178 The global effect of options (other than -daystart and -follow) is now
179 explained more clearly in the manual page. Savannah bug #15360.
182 * Major changes in release 4.3.1
186 Find now follows POSIX rules for determining where directories end and
187 expressions start. This means that "find \(1 \!2 \, \)" now searches
188 in the four named directories, rather than trying to parse an
189 expression. (Savannah bug #15235).
191 You now get a more helpful error message when you use command lines
192 which have missing expressions, such as
199 Savannah bug #15800: If find finds more subdirectories within a parent
200 directory than it previously expected to based on the link count of
201 the parent, the resulting error message now gives the correct
202 directory name (previously an error message was issued but it
203 specified the wrong directory).
205 Savannah bug #16738: "find .... -exec ... {} +" now works if you have
206 a large environment and many files must be passed to the -exec
207 action. The same problem affected the -execdir action, though since
208 the number of files in a given directory will normally be smaller, the
209 problem was worse for -exec.
211 Savannah bug #16579: Updatedb now works if it is running as a user
212 whose login shell is not actually a shell.
214 There have also been a number of documentation improvements (includng
215 Savannah bug #16269).
217 ** Functional changes
219 For find, debug output can now be enabled at runtime with the -D
220 option. This causes the printing of various sorts of information
221 about find's internal state and progress.
223 The find option -nowarn cannot itself produce a warning (this used to
224 happen with commands like "find . -name quux -nowarn -print").
226 ** Performance Enhancements
228 Find now has a rudimentary cost-based optimiser. It has an idea of
229 the basic cost of each test (i.e. that -name is very cheap while -size
230 is more expensive). It re-orders tests bearing in mind the cost of
231 each test and its likely success. Predicates with side effects (for
232 example -delete or -exec) are not reordered. The optimiser is not
233 yet enabled by default, but the new option -O controls the query
234 optimisation level. To see this in action, try
235 find -D opt -O3 . -type f -o -type c -o -size 555 -name Z
236 and compare the optimised query with:
237 find -D opt -O3 . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
239 find -D opt . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
241 Over time, as optimisations are proven to be robust and correct, they
242 will be moved to lower optimisation levels. Some optimisations have
243 always been performed by find (for example -name is always done early
248 Findutils 4.3.1 includes updated translations for the following
250 Vietnamese, Belarusian, Catalan, Danish, German, Greek, Esperanto,
251 Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Irish, Galician, Croatian, Hungarian,
252 Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Luganda, Malay, Dutch, Polish,
253 Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Kinyarwanda,
254 Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish, Chinese (simplified),
255 Chinese (traditional), Bulgarian
257 * Major changes in release 4.3.0
259 The 4.3.x release series are currently 'development' releases. Please
260 test it, but think carefully before installing it in a production
261 system. New features in findutils-4.3.x are under development; they
262 may change or go away.
264 All changes up to and including findutils-4.2.27 are included in this
265 release. In addition the following changes are new in this release:
267 ** Functional Changes
269 By default, find now uses the fts() function to search the file
270 system. The use of fts greatly increases find's ability to search
271 extremely deep directory hierarchites.
273 You can tell that the version of find you are using uses FTS, because
274 the output of "find --version" will include the word "FTS".
276 Currently two binaries for 'find' are built. The configure option
277 --without-fts can be used to select whether 'find' uses fts:
280 default configuration find oldfind
281 configure --with-fts find oldfind
282 configure --without-fts ftsfind find
284 New tests, -readable, -writable, -executable. These check that a file
285 can be read, written or executed respectively.
287 * Major changes in release 4.2.27
289 ** Warnings of Future Changes
291 The test -perm /000 currently matches no files, but for greater
292 consistency with -perm -000, this will be changed to match all files;
293 this change will probably be made in early 2006. Meanwhile, a warning
294 message is given if you do this.
298 If xargs is invoked with many short arguments on PPC systems running
299 the Linux kernel, we no longer get an "argument list too long" error
300 from the operating system.
302 Fixed a bug in the test suite which caused it to spuriously fail on
303 systems where ARG_MAX is different to the value used by the Linux
304 kernel on 32-bit x86-architecture systems.
306 On systems running the Linux kernel, "find -printf %F" no longer
307 produces the wrong answer for files on filesystems that have been
308 remounted elsewhere using "mount --bind". (Savannah bug #14921).
310 ** Documentation Changes
312 Following some extensive and detailed review comments from Aaron
313 Hawley, the material in the manual pages and the Texinfo manual are
316 The %M format specifier of "find -printf" is now documented, although
317 it has existed since release 4.2.5.
319 The 'find' manual page now correctly documents the fact that -regex
320 defaults to using Emacs-style regular expressions (though this can be
323 * Major changes in release 4.2.26
325 ** Public Service Announcements
327 I'd like to point out a second time that the interpretation of '-perm
328 +mode' has changed to be more POSIX-compliant. If you want the old
329 behaviour of the GNU extension you should use '-perm /mode'. See the
330 NEWS entry for findutils version 4.2.21 for details.
332 ** Functional Changes
334 The xargs command now supports a new option (--delimiter) which allows
335 input items to be separated by characters other than null and
336 whitespace. This resolves Savannah support request sr #102914.
338 Sometimes find needs to read the /etc/mtab file (or perform the
339 equivalent operation on systems not using /etc/mtab). If this
340 information is needed but not available, find now exits with an error
341 message non-zero status. If the information is not needed, find will
344 A new xargs option --delimiter allows the input delimiter to be
345 changed (previously \0 was the only choice unless you use the -L
346 option, which changes other semantics too).
350 If the environment size is too large to allow xargs to operate
351 normally, 'xargs --help' still works (now).
353 If the input to xargs is a large number of very short options (for
354 example, one character each), earlier versions of xargs would fail
355 with 'Argument list too long'. However, since this is precisely the
356 problem that xargs was invented to solve, this is a bug. Hence on
357 those systems we now correctly use a shorter command line. This
358 problem particularly affected 64-bit Linux systems because of the
359 larger size of pointers, although 32-bit Linux systems were also
360 affected (albeit for longer command lines). In theory the same
361 problem could affect 'find -exec {} +', but that's much less likely
362 (even so, the bug is fixed there too).
364 Bugfix for an unusual failure mode (Savannah bug #14842) where an
365 attempt to allocate more space for directory contents succeeds but is
366 incorrectly diagnosed as a failure. The likelihood of you
367 experiencing this depends on your architecture, operating system and
368 resource limits. This failure has been observed in a directory
369 containing 35396 entries.
371 ** Documentation Changes
373 The EXAMPLES section of the find manual page now correctly describes
374 the symbolic and octal modes for the -perm test.
376 The documentation and "--help" usage information for the -L, -l, -I
377 and -i options have been clarified (but the behaviour has not changed).
379 The documentation now explains more clearly what happens when you use
382 * Major changes in release 4.2.25
386 find -perm /440 (which should succeed if a file is readable by its
387 owner or group) now works. Previously there was a bug which caused
388 this to be treated as "find -perm 440".
390 Some files in the xargs test suite have been renamed to avoid problems
391 on operating systems whoch cannot distinguish filenames on the basis
392 of upper/lower case distinctions.
394 The software now builds on Cygwin, including the generated file
397 Findutils should now build once again on systems supporting AFS, but
398 this support has not recently been fully tested. Findutils should
399 also (once again) build on Cygwin.
403 The test suite for find is now much more extensive.
405 * Major changes in release 4.2.24
407 ** Documentation Changes
409 The manual now includes a "Worked Examples" section which talks about
410 the various ways in which findutils can be used to perform common
411 tasks, and why some of these alternatives are better than others.
413 The -I option of xargs (which is required by the POSIX standard) is
416 We now document the fact that find ensures that commands run by -ok
417 and -okdir don't steal find's input. Find does this by redirecting
418 the command's standard input from stdin.
420 Many documentation readability enhancements and proofreading fixes
421 were contributed by Aaron Hawley.
423 ** Functional Changes
425 *** Functional changes in locate
427 The "--regex" option of locate now assumes the regular expression to
428 be in the same syntax as is used in GNU Emacs, though this can be
429 changed with the new option --regextype. This is a change from the
430 existing behaviour (which was to use POSIX Basic Regular Expressions).
431 Since this feature is releatively new anyway, I though it was more
432 useful to have compatibility between regular expression handling in
433 find and locate than to maintain the short-lived previous behaviour of
436 The locate program now also supports a "--regextype" long option which
437 controls which regular expression syntax is understood by locate.
438 This is a long option and has no single-letter 'short option'
441 *** Functional changes in find
443 The regular expression syntax understood by "find" can be changed with
444 the -regextype option; this option is positional, meaning that you can
445 have several tests, each using a distinct syntax (this is not
446 recommended practice however).
448 The default regular expression syntax is substantially the same as
449 that recognised by GNU Emacs, except for the fact that "." will match
452 The leaf optimisation can be disabled with the configure option
453 "--disable-leaf-optimisation", which is equivalent to specifying
454 "-noleaf" on all find command lines. This is useful for systems
455 having filesystems which do not provide traditional Unix behaviour for
456 the link count on directories (for example Cygwin and the Solaris 9
457 HSFS implementation).
461 *** Bug Fixes for find
463 The -iregex test now works once again on systems that lack
464 re_search() (that is, systems on which findutils needs to use the
465 gnulib version of this function).
467 find -regex now once again uses GNU Emacs-compatible regular
470 If invoked with stderr closed, the -fprint and -fprintf actions now no
471 longer cause error messages to be sent into the output file.
473 If the link count of a directory is less that two, the leaf
474 optimisation is now disabled for that directory. This should allow
475 searching of non-Unix filesystems to be more reliable on systems that
476 don't take the trouble to make their filesystems look like traditional
477 Unix filesystems. Some filesystems don't even take the trouble to
478 have a link count of less than two and for these, -noleaf is still
479 required unless --disable-leaf-optimisation was used at configure time.
481 The "%Y" directive for the -printf action now no longer changes find's
482 idea of the mode of the file, so this means among other things that
483 "-printf %Y %y" now works properly. This is Savannah bug #13973.
485 * Major changes in release 4.2.23
487 ** Documentation Changes
489 The -L and -I options of xargs are currently incompatible (but should
492 Improved the documentation for -execdir and -okdir.
494 ** Functional Changes to updatedb
496 File names ending in "/" which are specified as an argument to
497 --prunepaths (or in $PRUNEPATHS) don't work, so we now issue an error
498 message if the user tries to do that. The obvious exception of course
499 is "/" which does work and is not rejected.
502 * Major changes in release 4.2.22
506 If a directory entry searched with "find -L" is a symbolic link to
507 ".", we no longer loop indefinitely. This problem affected find
508 versions 4.2.19, 4.2.20 and 4.2.21. This problem allows users to make
509 "find" loop indefinitely. This is in effect a denial of service and
510 could be used to prevent updates to the locate database or to defeat
511 file security checks based on find. However, it should be noted that
512 you should not use "find -L" in security-sensitive scenarios.
516 None in this release.
518 ** Functional Changes to locate
520 A locate database can now be supplied on stdin, using '-' as a element
521 of the database-path. If more than one database-path element is '-',
522 later instances are ignored.
524 A new option to locate, '--all' ('-A') causes matches to be limited to
525 entries which match all given patterns, not entries which match
526 one or more patterns.
528 ** Documentation Changes
530 Some typos in the manual pages have been fixed. Various parts of the
531 manual now point out that it is good practice to quote the argument of
532 "-name". The manpage now has a "NON-BUGS" section which explains some
533 symptoms that look like bugs but aren't. The explanations of the "%k"
534 and "%b" directives to "find -printf" have been imrpoved.
537 * Major changes in release 4.2.21
538 ** Functional Changes to find
540 The GNU extension "find ... -perm +MODE" has been withdrawn because it
541 is incompatible with POSIX in obscure cases like "find ... -perm ++r".
542 Use the new syntax "find ... -perm /MODE" instead. Old usages will
543 still continue to work, so long as they don't conflict with POSIX.
545 If the output is going to a terminal, the -print, -fprint, -printf and
546 -fprintf actions now quote "unusual" characters to prevent unwanted
547 effects on the terminal. See "Unusual Characters in File Names" for
548 further details. There is no change to the behaviour when the output
549 is not going to a terminal. The locate program does the same thing,
550 unless the -0 option is in effect (in which case the filenames are
553 ** Functional Changes to locate
555 The locate command will now read each locate database at most once.
556 This means that if you are using multiple databases and are searching
557 for more than one name, the results will now be printed in a different
558 order (and if you specified a small limit with --limit, you may get a
559 different set of results).
561 A new option '--print' for locate causes it to print the matching
562 results even if the '--count' or '--statistics' option is in effect.
565 find /blah/blah/blah -depth -empty now works once again.
567 The -regex and -iregex tests of find now correctly accept POSIX Basic
568 Regular Expressions. (Savannah bug #12999)
570 The updatedb program now works on systems where "su" does not support
571 the "-s" option, for example Solaris.
573 * Major changes in release 4.2.20
574 ** Internationalization and Localization
575 Updated Vietnamese and Dutch translations.
578 Minor bugfix affecting only those who compile from the CVS repository,
579 as opposed to those who compile from the source releases.
581 * Major changes in release 4.2.19
584 find should now no longer hang on systems which lack the O_NOFOLLOW
585 flag to open(2) and which are clients of an unresponsive NFS server
586 (Savannah bug #12044).
588 We now avoid inappropriately failing for "find -L foo" or "find -H
589 foo" if foo is a symbolic link (Savannah bug #12181). Previously we
590 used to fail with the error message "Too many levels of symbolic
593 "find . -false -exec foo {} +" no longer runs an extra instance of foo
594 when find exits (Savannah bug #12230).
596 If the chdir() safety check fails but we can no longer get back to
597 where we started, exit with an explanatory (fatal) error message.
598 This does not happen on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD because the safety check
599 is not needed (the security problem the safety check protects against
600 is prevented in a cleaner way on those systems).
602 "make distclean" no longer deletes regex.c (which "make all" needs).
604 ** Functionality Changes
605 "find -printf "%h\n" will now print "." for files in the current directory.
606 Previously it printed nothing (but there was a bug in the %h
607 implementation anyway). This fixes Savannah bug #12085.
609 Should now build (again) on non-C99-compliant systems.
611 ** Documentation enhancements
612 Fixed some typos and clarified wording in "Working with automounters".
614 ** Internationalization and Localization
615 New Vietnamese message translation.
617 * Major changes in release 4.2.18
619 *** "find -depth" was missing out non-leaf directories when they contain
620 non-directories. This affected findutils releases 4.2.15,
621 4.2.16 and 4.2.17, but the bug is now fixed.
622 *** Find no longer hangs on systems which are clients of unresponsive
624 ** Documentation improvements
625 *** Improvements and corrections to the find.1 manpage, including corrections to the descriptions of -H and -L.
627 * Major changes in release 4.2.17
629 *** bug #11861 undefined symbol "basename" on IRIX 5.3
630 *** bug #11865 xargs -i regression (as compared to findutils-4.2.12)
631 *** bug #11866 Typo in pred_okdir renders it useless (affecting 4.2.16 only)
632 *** patch #3723 fix recent process_top_path change (for -execdir on /)
633 *** Fixing bug #11866 and applying patch #3723 made -execdir work much better.
634 *** find bar/baz/ugh now works again if baz is a symbolic link (broken
637 * Major changes in release 4.2.16
638 ** Functionality Changes
639 *** Updated the message catalogues for the translated messages.
640 *** The subfs filesystem is now treated the same as the autofs
642 *** New translations: Belarusian, Catalan, Greek, Esperanto,
643 Finnish, Irish, Croatian, Hungarian, Japanese, Luganda,
644 Malay, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian, Chinese (simplified).
647 *** The -execdir action now works correctly for files named on the
650 * Major changes in release 4.2.15
651 ** Functionality Changes
652 *** locate now supports matching regular expression (--regex).
653 *** --enable-d_type-optimization (introduced in findutils 4.2.13) is now turned on by default.
655 * Major changes in release 4.2.14
656 ** Functionality Changes
657 *** New options -L, -P, -H for locate. The work in the same was as the same options for find.
659 *** Don't include the "findutils/find/testsuite/find.gnu" subdirectory in the
660 distributed tar file more than once.
661 *** Should now build on Solaris once again.
662 *** -xtype and -printf %Y now work correctly for symbolic links once again
663 ** Documentation improvements
664 *** All options for "locate" are now documented
666 * Major changes in release 4.2.13
667 ** Performance Enhancements
668 *** On Linux and some other systems, a large performance improvement,
669 because we can eliminate many of the calls to lstat() (in extreme
670 cases, 99% of them). Limited testing shows a 2x speedup on NFS
671 filesystems. Other systems which can make use of this enhancement
672 include Mac OS X and *BSD.
674 * Major changes in release 4.2.12
675 ** Functionality Changes
676 *** find is now POSIX-compliant, as far as I know.
677 *** -exec ... {} + now works.
678 *** New actions -execdir and -okdir which are like -exec and -ok but more secure.
679 *** "locate -w" is now a synonym for "locate --wholepath".
680 *** An empty path entry in the locate database path (for example "::" in
681 $LOCATE_PATH or in the argument to "locate -d") is taken to mean
682 the default database, whose name is hard-coded in locate.
684 *** If find or xargs cannot write to stdout, for example because
685 output is redirected to a file and the disk is full, the
686 relevant program will return a non-zero exit status.
688 * Major changes in release 4.2.11
690 *** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW.
691 *** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a.
692 ** Functionality Changes
693 *** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line,
694 or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce
695 a more helpful error message.
696 *** locate -b is now a synonym for locate --basename
697 *** locate now supports a --statistics (or -S) option, which prints some
698 statistics about the locate databases.
699 *** Implemented the -samefile option.
700 ** Documentation improvements
701 *** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations".
702 *** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to Stepan Kasal)
704 *** locate's options -i and -w now work with the -e option (previously a bug
707 * Major changes in release 4.2.10
709 *** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly
710 also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
713 * Major changes in release 4.2.9
714 ** Functionality Changes
715 *** 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_".
716 *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms
717 for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
720 *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.
721 Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
722 invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
724 *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
725 *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune
726 is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
727 ** Documentation improvements
728 *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime
729 and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
731 * Major changes in release 4.2.8
732 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
733 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
736 * Major changes in release 4.2.7
737 ** Functionality Changes
738 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
739 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
740 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
741 ** Documentation improvements
742 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
743 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
744 are not are explained in this chapter.
746 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
748 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
750 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
751 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
753 * Major changes in release 4.2.6
755 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
756 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
757 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
758 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
761 * Major changes in release 4.2.5
762 ** Functionality Changes
763 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
764 find will follow symbolic links.
765 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
767 ** Documentation improvements
768 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
770 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
771 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
772 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
773 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
774 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
775 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
776 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
778 * Major changes in release 4.2.4
779 ** Functionality Changes
780 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
781 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
783 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
784 doesn't support that much).
785 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
786 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
787 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
788 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
789 by the use of the -nowarn option.
790 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
791 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
792 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
793 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
795 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
796 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
797 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
798 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
799 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
800 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
801 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
802 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
803 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
804 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
805 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
807 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
808 systems that have non-writable string constants.
809 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
810 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
811 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
813 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
815 * Major changes in release 4.2.3
816 ** Functionality Changes
817 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
818 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
819 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
820 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
821 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
822 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
823 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
824 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
825 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
826 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
827 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
828 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
829 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
830 directory we've just returned out of).
832 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
834 * Major changes in release 4.2.2
835 ** Documentation improvements
836 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
838 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
839 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
840 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
842 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
843 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
845 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
846 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
847 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
848 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
850 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
852 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
853 requires it, as explained at
854 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
856 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
858 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
859 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
860 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
861 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
862 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
864 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
866 * Major changes in release 4.2.0
867 ** Functionality Changes
868 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
869 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
870 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
871 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
872 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
873 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
874 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
875 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
876 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
877 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
878 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
879 find stats the file. There is also an option
880 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
881 ** Documentation improvements
882 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
883 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
884 The find manual page also now includes a section
885 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
886 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
887 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
888 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
889 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
890 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
892 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
894 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
895 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
896 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
897 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
898 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
899 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
900 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
901 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
902 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
903 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
904 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
905 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
906 database if it fails.
907 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
908 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
910 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
911 This was broken in 4.1.20.
913 * Major changes in release 4.1.20:
914 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
915 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
917 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
918 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
919 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
920 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
922 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
924 * Major changes in release 4.1.7:
925 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
926 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
928 * Major changes in release 4.1.6:
929 correct bug in prune.
930 added --ignore-case option for locate
932 * Major changes in release 4.1.5:
933 Add support for large files
935 * Major changes in release 4.1.4:
936 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
938 * Major changes in release 4.1.3:
939 added internationalization and localization.
941 * Major changes in release 4.1.1:
942 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
943 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
945 * Major changes in release 4.1:
947 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
948 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
949 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
950 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
952 * Major changes in release 4.0:
956 *** Man page for updatedb.
957 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
960 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
961 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
962 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
963 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
964 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
965 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
968 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
969 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
970 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
971 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
972 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
973 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
975 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
978 *** Takes command-line options.
981 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
982 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
983 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
985 * Major changes in release 3.8:
987 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
988 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
989 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
991 * Major changes in release 3.7:
993 ** locate can search multiple databases
994 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
995 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
998 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
1000 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
1001 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
1002 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
1003 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
1004 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf