1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
8 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
10 ** Changes in behavior
12 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
13 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
14 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
15 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
16 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
17 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
19 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
20 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
21 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
25 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
28 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
32 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
33 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
34 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
36 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
37 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
38 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
40 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
41 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
42 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
44 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
45 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
47 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
48 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
50 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
51 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
53 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
54 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
58 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
59 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
60 processed portion thereof.
62 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
63 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
65 ** Changes in behavior
67 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
68 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
69 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
71 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
72 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
73 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
75 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
76 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
78 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
79 Use --preserve-context instead.
81 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
84 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
88 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
89 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
90 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
91 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
92 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
94 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
95 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
97 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
98 reject file names invalid for that file system.
100 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
101 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
105 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
106 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
107 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
108 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
109 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
110 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
111 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
112 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
114 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
115 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
116 the same number of fields are output for each line.
118 ** Changes in behavior
120 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
121 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
122 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
125 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
129 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
130 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
131 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
134 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
138 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
139 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
141 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
142 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
144 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
145 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
147 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
148 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
149 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
150 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
152 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
153 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
155 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
156 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
157 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
159 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
161 ** Changes in behavior
163 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
164 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
165 to the number of available processors.
169 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
172 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
176 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
177 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
178 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
179 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
181 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
182 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
183 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
185 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
186 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
188 ** Changes in behavior
190 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
191 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
193 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
194 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
195 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
196 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
197 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
198 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
200 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
201 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
202 the same way as the others.
205 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
209 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
210 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
211 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
213 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
214 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
216 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
217 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
218 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
220 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
221 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
223 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
224 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
226 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
227 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
228 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
230 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
231 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
232 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
233 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
237 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
238 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
240 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
243 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
244 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
246 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
248 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
249 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
250 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
252 ** Changes in behavior
254 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
255 rather than its aliased target.
257 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
258 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
259 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
261 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
262 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
263 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
264 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
265 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
266 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
267 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
268 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
270 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
272 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
274 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
275 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
278 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
279 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
280 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
281 control like taskset for example.
283 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
285 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
286 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
287 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
288 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
289 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
290 includes %C when context information is available.
292 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
293 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
294 rather than a file system attribute.
296 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
297 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
298 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
299 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
301 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
302 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
303 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
305 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
306 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
307 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
310 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
314 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
315 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
317 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
319 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
320 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
322 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
323 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
324 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
325 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
327 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
328 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
329 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
333 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
334 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
336 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
337 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
338 duration after the initial signal was sent.
340 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
341 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
342 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
343 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
344 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
345 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
346 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
347 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
348 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
350 ** Changes in behavior
352 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
353 sequence when it would be a no-op.
355 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
356 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
359 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
363 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
364 of available processors, which may not have been the case
365 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
366 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
370 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
371 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
373 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
374 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
375 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
376 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
378 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
379 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
380 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
383 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
387 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
388 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
389 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
391 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
392 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
393 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
395 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
396 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
398 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
399 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
400 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
401 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
403 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
404 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
405 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
407 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
408 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
409 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
410 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
412 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
413 renamed-aside and then recreated.
414 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
416 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
417 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
418 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
419 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
421 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
422 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
423 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
425 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
426 processes will not intersperse their output.
427 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
430 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
434 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
435 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
437 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
438 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
440 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
441 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
442 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
443 the presence of the empty string argument.
444 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
446 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
447 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
448 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
449 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
451 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
452 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
454 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
455 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
456 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
458 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
459 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
460 and with a malicious user on the same system
461 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
462 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
465 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
469 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
470 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
471 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
473 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
474 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
475 offending directory and all "contents."
477 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
478 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
479 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
481 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
482 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
483 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
485 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
486 processes will not intersperse their output.
487 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
488 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
490 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
491 output the name of the file to stdout.
492 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
494 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
495 call fails with errno == EACCES.
496 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
498 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
499 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
502 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
503 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
504 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
506 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
507 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
508 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
509 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
510 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
511 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
513 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
514 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
515 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
516 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
518 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
519 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
521 ** Changes in behavior
523 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
524 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
525 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
526 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
527 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
529 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
530 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
531 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
532 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
534 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
536 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
537 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
538 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
539 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
540 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
544 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
548 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
549 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
551 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
552 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
554 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
555 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
556 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
558 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
559 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
562 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
566 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
567 when the source file doesn't have write access.
568 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
570 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
571 to accommodate leap seconds.
572 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
574 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
575 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
576 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
578 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
580 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
581 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
582 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
584 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
585 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
586 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
587 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
588 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
592 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
593 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
594 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
595 directory or a symlink to a directory.
597 ** Changes in behavior
599 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
600 environment variable is set.
602 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
603 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
604 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
608 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
609 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
610 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
611 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
613 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
614 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
615 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
616 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
620 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
621 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
622 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
624 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
625 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
626 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
627 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
628 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
629 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
632 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
633 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
636 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
640 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
641 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
642 and libraries tested at configure time.
643 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
645 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
646 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
648 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
649 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
651 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
652 printing a summary to stderr.
653 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
655 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
656 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
657 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
659 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
660 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
662 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
663 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
664 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
665 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
667 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
668 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
669 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
670 which is relatively unusual.
671 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
673 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
674 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
675 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
676 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
677 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
678 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
679 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
683 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
684 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
685 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
686 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
687 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
691 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
692 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
694 ** Changes in behavior
696 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
697 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
698 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
699 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
700 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
703 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
707 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
708 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
710 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
711 before data copying has started.
713 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
714 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
716 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
717 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
718 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
719 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
721 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
722 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
723 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
724 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
726 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
731 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
732 for its standard streams.
734 ** Changes in behavior
736 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
737 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
738 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
739 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
740 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
741 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
743 ** Deprecated options
745 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
746 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
750 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
752 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
753 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
756 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
758 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
759 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
761 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
762 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
765 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
769 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
770 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
771 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
772 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
774 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
775 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
776 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
777 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
778 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
783 make check: two tests have been corrected
787 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
788 inherited from gnulib.
791 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
795 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
796 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
797 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
798 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
800 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
801 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
803 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
805 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
806 systems without xattr support.
808 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
809 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
810 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
812 ** Changes in behavior
814 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
815 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
816 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
817 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
819 ** Improved robustness
821 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
822 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
823 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
824 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
825 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
826 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
827 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
828 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
829 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
833 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
834 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
836 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
837 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
838 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
839 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
840 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
843 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
847 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
848 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
849 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
853 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
854 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
855 data was read, or on process exit.
856 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
858 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
859 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
860 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
861 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
863 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
864 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
865 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
866 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
868 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
869 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
871 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
872 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
874 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
875 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
876 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
878 ** Changes in behavior
880 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
881 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
882 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
884 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
885 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
887 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
888 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
889 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
892 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
896 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
898 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
899 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
900 install: Never copies xattrs
902 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
903 from overwriting any existing destination file
905 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
906 mode where this feature is available.
908 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
909 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
910 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
911 do not modify the destination at all.
913 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
915 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
919 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
920 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
922 cp uses much less memory in some situations
924 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
925 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
927 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
928 processing the first file name
930 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
931 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
932 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
933 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
935 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
936 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
938 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
939 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
942 ** Changes in behavior
944 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
945 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
947 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
948 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
949 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
951 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
952 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
954 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
956 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
957 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
958 is still marked with a '+'.
961 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
965 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
966 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
970 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
971 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
972 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
973 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
974 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
975 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
977 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
978 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
980 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
981 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
983 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
985 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
986 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
987 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
989 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
990 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
992 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
993 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
994 used to factor large numbers.
996 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
999 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1001 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1003 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1004 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1006 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1007 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1008 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1009 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1011 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1012 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1013 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1015 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1016 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1020 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1022 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1023 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1025 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1026 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1028 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1030 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1031 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1035 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1036 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1037 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1039 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1041 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1042 no matter how many files are in a given directory
1044 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1045 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1046 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1048 ** Changes in behavior
1050 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1051 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1054 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1058 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1060 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1061 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1062 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1064 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1065 with no USERNAME argument.
1067 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1068 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1069 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1071 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1072 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1073 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1074 number of fields for some inputs.
1076 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1077 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1079 ** Changes in behavior
1081 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1082 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1085 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1089 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1091 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1092 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1093 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1094 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1096 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1097 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1099 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1100 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1102 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1103 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1105 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1106 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1107 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1108 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1110 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1111 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1112 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1113 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1114 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1115 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1117 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1118 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1120 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1121 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1122 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1124 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1125 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1127 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1128 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1130 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1131 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1132 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1133 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1135 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1136 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1138 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1139 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1141 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1142 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1143 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1147 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1148 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1150 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1151 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1152 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1153 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1157 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1158 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1160 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1162 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1166 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1167 which have negative errno values.
1171 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1175 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1179 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1180 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1183 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1187 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1188 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1189 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1191 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1192 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1193 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1194 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1198 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1199 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1200 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1201 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1204 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1208 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1210 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1211 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1212 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1215 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1219 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1220 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1222 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1224 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1226 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1228 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1232 ** Changes in behavior
1234 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1235 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1237 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1238 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1240 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1241 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1242 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1246 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1247 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1248 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1249 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1250 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1251 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1252 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1253 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1254 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1255 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1256 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1258 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1259 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1260 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1263 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1266 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1267 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1268 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1270 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1271 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1272 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1275 ** New build options
1277 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1278 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1279 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1280 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1282 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1283 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1284 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1285 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1286 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1287 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1288 of "make check" fail.
1290 ** Remove deprecated options
1292 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1293 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1294 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1295 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1296 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1298 ** Improved robustness
1300 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1301 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1302 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1303 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1304 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1305 loss of the contents of a/f.
1307 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1308 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1312 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1313 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1314 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1316 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1317 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1318 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1319 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1321 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1322 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1323 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1324 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1325 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1326 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1327 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1328 destination is a symlink.
1330 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1332 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1333 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1335 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1336 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1338 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1340 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1341 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1343 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1344 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1346 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1349 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1350 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1352 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1353 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1355 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1356 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1357 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1358 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1360 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1361 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1362 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1364 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1365 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1366 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1368 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1369 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1370 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1371 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1373 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1374 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1375 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1377 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1378 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1380 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1381 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1383 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1385 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1386 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1387 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1389 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1390 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1392 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1393 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1395 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1396 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1398 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1399 [present in the original version]
1402 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1406 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1408 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1409 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1410 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1412 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1413 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1415 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1419 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1420 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1422 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1423 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1425 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1426 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1428 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1429 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1430 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1431 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1432 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1433 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1435 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1436 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1439 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1440 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1442 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1445 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1446 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1447 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1449 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1450 directory is unreadable.
1452 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1453 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1454 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1456 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1457 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1458 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1459 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1460 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1463 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1464 Before it would print nothing.
1466 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1468 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1469 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1470 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1471 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1472 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1473 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1474 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1475 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1477 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1481 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1482 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1483 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1485 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1486 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1487 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1488 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1491 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1495 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1496 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1497 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1498 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1499 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1500 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1501 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1503 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1504 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1505 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1506 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1507 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1508 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1509 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1510 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1512 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1513 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1514 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1517 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1521 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1522 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1524 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1525 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1526 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1528 ** Improved robustness
1530 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1531 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1532 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1535 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1539 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1540 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1541 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1542 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1543 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1545 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1549 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1552 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1556 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1557 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1558 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1559 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1561 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1562 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1564 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1565 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1566 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1569 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1571 ** Improved robustness
1573 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1574 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1576 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1577 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1578 or NFS-mounted partition.
1580 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1581 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1585 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1586 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1587 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1588 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1589 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1590 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1592 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1593 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1595 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1596 or neglect to report file removal.
1598 For the "groups" command:
1600 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1601 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1603 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1605 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1607 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1611 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1612 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1615 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1617 ** Changes in behavior
1619 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1620 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1621 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1622 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1624 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1625 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1626 a final `./' or `../' component.
1628 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1629 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1630 this only for pipes.
1632 ** Infrastructure changes
1634 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1635 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1636 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1637 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1641 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1642 name is "." or "..".
1644 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1645 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1646 dirent.d_type support.
1648 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1649 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1651 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1652 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1653 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1654 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1657 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1659 ** Changes in behavior
1661 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1665 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1666 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1670 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1671 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1672 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1674 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1675 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1677 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1678 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1680 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1682 ** Improved robustness
1684 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1685 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1686 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1688 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1689 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1692 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1693 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1695 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1696 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1698 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1699 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1701 ** Changes in behavior
1703 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1704 where the two are distinct.
1706 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1707 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1708 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1709 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1710 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1711 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1712 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1713 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1714 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1715 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1716 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1717 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1718 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1719 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1720 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1721 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1722 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1724 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1725 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1726 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1728 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1729 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1730 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1731 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1734 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1735 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1739 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1740 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1741 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1742 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1744 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1745 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1746 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1748 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1749 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1750 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1751 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1752 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1755 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1756 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1758 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1759 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1760 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1761 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1763 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1764 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1765 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1767 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1768 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1769 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1770 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1772 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1773 and sticky) with the -m option.
1775 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1776 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1777 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1778 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1779 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1781 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1782 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1784 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1788 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1789 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1790 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1791 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1793 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1795 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1797 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1798 silently ignoring one of them.
1800 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1801 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1802 containing this change was 5.92.
1804 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1805 automatically newline terminated.
1807 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1808 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1809 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1810 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1813 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1814 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1815 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1818 ** Scheduled for removal
1820 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1821 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1823 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1824 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1825 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1826 command to unlink a directory.
1828 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1829 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1830 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1831 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1835 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1836 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1837 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1838 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1839 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1840 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1844 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1845 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1847 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1849 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1850 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1851 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1853 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1854 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1857 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1858 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1860 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1861 list directories before files.
1863 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1864 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1865 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1866 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1869 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1871 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1873 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1874 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1875 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1877 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1878 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1882 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1883 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1884 usually printing nothing.
1886 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1888 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1889 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1890 them with hard-linked directories.
1892 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1893 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1894 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1896 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1897 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1898 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1900 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1903 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1904 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1906 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1907 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1909 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1910 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1912 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1913 all command-line arguments.
1915 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1917 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1919 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1920 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1922 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1924 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1925 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1926 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1927 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1928 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1930 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1931 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1933 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1934 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1935 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1936 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1938 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1940 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1944 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1945 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1947 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1948 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1950 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1951 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1953 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1954 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1956 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1957 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1959 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1961 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1962 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1963 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1966 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1968 ** Build-related bug fixes
1970 installing .mo files would fail
1973 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1977 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1979 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1982 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1986 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1987 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1991 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1993 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1994 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1996 ** Deprecated options
1998 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1999 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
2001 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2005 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2007 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2008 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2009 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2010 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2012 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2015 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2021 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2026 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2028 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2030 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2031 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2032 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2034 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2035 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2036 problematic usages. These include:
2038 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2039 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2040 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2041 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2042 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2043 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2044 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2045 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2046 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2048 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2049 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2051 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2052 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2053 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2054 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2056 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2057 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2058 between binary and text files.
2060 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2064 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2068 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2069 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2071 head tac tail tee tr
2072 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2074 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2075 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2077 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2078 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2079 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2081 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2083 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2085 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2086 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2087 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2091 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2093 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2094 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2096 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2097 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2098 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2102 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2103 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2107 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2108 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2109 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2113 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2114 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2118 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2120 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2122 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2126 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2127 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2128 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2130 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2131 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2132 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2133 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2134 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2136 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2140 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2141 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2142 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2144 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2146 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2147 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2148 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2149 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2151 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2153 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2154 rather than silently wrapping around.
2156 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2157 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2159 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2160 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2162 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2163 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2164 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2165 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2167 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2169 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2171 ** Improved robustness
2173 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2174 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2175 no matter how large the result.
2177 ** Improved portability
2179 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2180 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2182 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2184 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2185 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2186 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2188 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2189 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2193 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2194 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2196 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2198 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2199 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2200 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2201 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2203 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2204 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2206 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2207 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2208 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2210 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2212 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2213 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2215 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2216 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2218 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2220 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2221 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2223 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2224 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2226 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2227 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2228 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2230 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2232 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2234 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2238 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2240 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2241 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2242 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2244 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2245 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2247 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2248 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2249 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2251 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2252 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2254 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2255 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2256 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2257 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2259 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2260 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2262 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2263 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2264 the file system does not support it.
2266 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2268 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2269 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2271 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2273 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2274 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2276 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2277 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2278 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2279 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2281 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2282 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2285 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2286 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2287 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2288 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2290 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2291 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2292 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2293 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2295 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2296 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2298 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2300 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2301 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2302 reporting incorrect results.
2306 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2307 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2309 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2312 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2314 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2315 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2317 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2318 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2320 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2323 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2324 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2325 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2326 the file name does not look like a page range.
2328 printf has several changes:
2330 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2331 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2333 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2334 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2335 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2337 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2338 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2341 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2342 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2344 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2345 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2347 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2349 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2350 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2352 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2354 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2356 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2357 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2358 when first encountering the directory.
2362 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2363 output; POSIX requires this.
2365 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2366 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2368 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2370 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2371 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2373 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2374 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2376 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2377 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2378 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2379 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2380 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2381 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2382 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2384 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2385 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2386 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2388 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2389 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2391 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2393 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2395 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2396 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2397 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2398 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2400 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2404 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2405 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2406 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2407 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2408 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2410 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2411 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2412 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2414 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2415 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2417 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2418 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2420 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2421 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2422 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2423 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2424 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2426 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2427 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2429 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2430 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2432 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2434 nocreat do not create the output file
2435 excl fail if the output file already exists
2436 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2437 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2439 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2441 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2442 direct use direct I/O for data
2443 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2444 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2445 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2446 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2447 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2449 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2451 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2452 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2455 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2456 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2457 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2458 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2459 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2460 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2462 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2463 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2465 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2468 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2470 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2472 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2473 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2475 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2476 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2477 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2479 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2480 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2481 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2483 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2485 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2486 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2488 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2489 for compatibility with bash.
2491 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2493 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2494 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2495 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2496 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2498 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2499 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2501 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2502 ls supports TABSIZE.
2503 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2504 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2505 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2507 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2510 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2512 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2513 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2514 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2515 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2516 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2517 an offset, not as a file name.
2519 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2520 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2522 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2523 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2525 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2526 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2528 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2529 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2530 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2532 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2533 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2535 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2536 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2540 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2542 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2544 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2548 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2549 or more arguments between partitions.
2551 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2552 holes in the destination.
2554 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2555 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2556 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2557 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2558 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2559 terminates immediately.
2561 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2563 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2565 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2566 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2567 not the empty string.
2569 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2570 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2574 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2575 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2576 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2579 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2586 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2590 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2591 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2593 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2594 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2596 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2597 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2598 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2601 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2605 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2606 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2608 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2609 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2611 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2612 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2613 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2615 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2617 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2620 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2622 ** Configuration option
2624 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2625 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2629 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2630 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2634 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2635 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2636 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2639 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2640 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2641 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2642 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2643 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2644 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2645 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2648 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2652 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2653 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2654 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2656 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2657 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2659 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2661 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2662 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2663 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2664 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2666 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2668 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2669 not just the ones that reference directories
2671 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2672 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2674 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2675 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2676 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2678 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2679 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2680 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2681 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2682 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2683 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2685 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2690 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2691 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2693 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2695 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2697 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2699 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2700 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2702 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2703 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2705 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2707 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2711 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2713 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2715 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2716 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2717 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2718 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2719 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2721 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2722 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2724 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2725 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2727 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2728 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2730 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2731 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2732 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2736 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2737 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2738 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2739 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2740 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2741 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2742 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2743 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2744 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2745 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2746 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2747 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2748 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2749 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2751 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2753 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2754 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2756 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2758 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2760 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2761 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2763 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2765 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2766 without a trailing newline.
2768 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2769 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2771 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2774 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2778 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2780 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2782 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2783 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2784 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2785 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2787 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2789 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2790 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2791 be printed without leading spaces.
2793 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2794 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2799 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2800 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2801 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2803 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2805 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2806 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2808 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2809 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2811 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2812 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2814 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2816 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2818 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2820 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2821 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2823 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2825 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2827 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2828 byte offsets are specified.
2831 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2834 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2837 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2838 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2839 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2840 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2841 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2842 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2843 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2844 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2845 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2846 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2847 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2848 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2849 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2850 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2851 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2852 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2853 directory where M has write access.
2854 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2855 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2856 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2859 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2860 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2861 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2862 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2863 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2864 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2865 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2866 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2867 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2868 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2869 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2870 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2871 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2872 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2873 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2874 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2875 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2876 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2877 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2878 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2879 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2880 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2881 appeared one additional time.
2883 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2884 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2885 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2886 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2889 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2890 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2891 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2892 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2893 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2894 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2895 if there were more than 338.
2897 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2898 - false --help now exits nonzero
2901 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2902 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2903 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2904 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2907 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2908 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2909 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2910 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2911 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2914 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2915 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2916 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2917 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2918 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2919 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2920 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2923 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2924 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2925 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2926 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2927 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2928 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2930 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2931 under certain unusual conditions
2932 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2933 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2936 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2937 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2938 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2939 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2940 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2941 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2942 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2943 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2944 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2945 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2946 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2947 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2948 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2949 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2950 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2951 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2954 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2955 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2958 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2959 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2960 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2961 involving hard-linked directories
2962 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2963 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2964 character-special and block files
2967 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2968 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2969 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2970 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2971 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2972 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2973 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2974 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2975 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2977 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2978 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2979 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2980 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2981 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2982 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2983 specified on the command line.
2984 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2985 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2986 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2987 the first file untouched.
2988 * readlink: new program
2989 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2990 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2991 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2992 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2993 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2994 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2997 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2998 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2999 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3000 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3001 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3002 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3003 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3004 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3005 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3006 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3007 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3008 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3010 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3011 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3012 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3014 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3015 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3016 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3017 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3018 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3019 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3020 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3021 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3024 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3025 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3028 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3029 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3030 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3031 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3032 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3033 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3034 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3037 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3038 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3040 ========================================================================
3041 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3042 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3045 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3047 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3048 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3049 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3050 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3051 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3052 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3053 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3054 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3055 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3056 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3057 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3058 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3060 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3061 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3062 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3063 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3065 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3068 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3070 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3071 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3072 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3073 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3074 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3075 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3076 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3079 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3080 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3081 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3082 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3083 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3084 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3085 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3086 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3087 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3088 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3089 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3090 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3091 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3092 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3093 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3094 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3096 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3097 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3099 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3100 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3101 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3102 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3103 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3104 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3106 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3107 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3108 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3109 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3110 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3111 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3112 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3114 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3115 the source files in the following example:
3116 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3117 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3118 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3119 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3120 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3121 links between source files with --preserve=links
3122 * cp accepts new options:
3123 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3124 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3125 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3126 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3127 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3128 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3129 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3130 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3131 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3133 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3134 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3135 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3136 even though it's older than dest.
3137 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3138 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3139 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3140 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3141 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3143 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3144 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3145 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3146 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3147 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3148 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3149 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3151 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3152 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3153 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3155 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3156 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3157 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3158 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3159 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3160 This is the default.
3162 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3163 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3164 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3165 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3166 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3168 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3171 ========================================================================
3172 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3173 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3176 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3177 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3179 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3180 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3181 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3182 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3183 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3185 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3186 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3187 that specifies a non-directory
3190 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3191 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3192 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3193 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3194 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3195 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3196 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3197 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3198 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3199 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3200 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3201 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3202 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3203 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3204 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3205 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3206 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3207 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3208 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3209 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3210 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3211 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3212 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3213 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3215 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3216 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3217 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3219 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3221 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3222 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3224 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3225 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3226 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3227 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3228 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3230 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3231 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3232 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3233 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3234 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3236 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3238 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3239 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3240 * still more portability fixes
3241 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3242 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3244 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3246 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3248 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3250 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3251 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3252 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3253 there is any time remaining
3254 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3256 ========================================================================
3257 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3258 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3260 This package began as the union of the following:
3261 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3263 ========================================================================
3265 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3267 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3268 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3269 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3270 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3271 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3272 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.