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.
24 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
28 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
29 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
30 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
32 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
33 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
34 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
36 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
37 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
38 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
40 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
41 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
43 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
44 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
46 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
47 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
49 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
50 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
54 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
55 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
56 processed portion thereof.
58 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
59 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
61 ** Changes in behavior
63 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
64 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
65 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
67 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
68 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
69 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
71 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
72 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
74 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
75 Use --preserve-context instead.
77 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
80 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
84 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
85 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
86 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
87 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
88 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
90 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
91 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
93 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
94 reject file names invalid for that file system.
96 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
97 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
101 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
102 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
103 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
104 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
105 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
106 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
107 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
108 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
110 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
111 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
112 the same number of fields are output for each line.
114 ** Changes in behavior
116 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
117 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
118 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
121 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
125 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
126 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
127 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
130 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
134 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
135 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
137 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
138 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
140 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
141 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
143 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
144 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
145 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
146 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
148 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
149 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
151 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
152 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
153 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
155 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
157 ** Changes in behavior
159 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
160 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
161 to the number of available processors.
165 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
168 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
172 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
173 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
174 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
175 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
177 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
178 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
179 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
181 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
182 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
184 ** Changes in behavior
186 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
187 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
189 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
190 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
191 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
192 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
193 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
194 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
196 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
197 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
198 the same way as the others.
201 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
205 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
206 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
207 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
209 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
210 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
212 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
213 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
214 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
216 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
217 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
219 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
220 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
222 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
223 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
224 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
226 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
227 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
228 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
229 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
233 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
234 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
236 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
239 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
240 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
242 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
244 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
245 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
246 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
248 ** Changes in behavior
250 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
251 rather than its aliased target.
253 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
254 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
255 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
257 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
258 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
259 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
260 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
261 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
262 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
263 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
264 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
266 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
268 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
270 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
271 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
274 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
275 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
276 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
277 control like taskset for example.
279 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
281 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
282 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
283 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
284 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
285 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
286 includes %C when context information is available.
288 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
289 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
290 rather than a file system attribute.
292 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
293 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
294 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
295 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
297 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
298 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
299 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
301 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
302 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
303 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
306 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
310 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
311 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
313 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
315 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
316 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
318 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
319 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
320 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
321 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
323 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
324 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
325 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
329 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
330 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
332 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
333 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
334 duration after the initial signal was sent.
336 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
337 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
338 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
339 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
340 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
341 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
342 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
343 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
344 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
346 ** Changes in behavior
348 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
349 sequence when it would be a no-op.
351 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
352 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
355 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
359 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
360 of available processors, which may not have been the case
361 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
362 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
366 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
367 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
369 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
370 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
371 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
372 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
374 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
375 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
376 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
379 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
383 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
384 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
385 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
387 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
388 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
389 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
391 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
392 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
394 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
395 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
396 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
397 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
399 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
400 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
401 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
403 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
404 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
405 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
406 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
408 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
409 renamed-aside and then recreated.
410 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
412 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
413 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
414 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
415 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
417 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
418 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
419 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
421 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
422 processes will not intersperse their output.
423 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
426 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
430 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
431 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
433 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
434 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
436 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
437 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
438 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
439 the presence of the empty string argument.
440 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
442 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
443 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
444 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
445 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
447 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
448 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
450 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
451 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
452 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
454 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
455 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
456 and with a malicious user on the same system
457 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
458 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
461 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
465 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
466 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
467 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
469 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
470 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
471 offending directory and all "contents."
473 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
474 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
475 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
477 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
478 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
479 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
481 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
482 processes will not intersperse their output.
483 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
484 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
486 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
487 output the name of the file to stdout.
488 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
490 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
491 call fails with errno == EACCES.
492 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
494 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
495 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
498 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
499 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
500 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
502 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
503 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
504 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
505 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
506 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
507 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
509 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
510 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
511 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
512 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
514 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
515 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
517 ** Changes in behavior
519 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
520 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
521 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
522 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
523 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
525 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
526 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
527 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
528 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
530 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
532 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
533 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
534 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
535 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
536 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
540 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
544 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
545 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
547 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
548 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
550 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
551 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
552 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
554 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
555 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
558 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
562 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
563 when the source file doesn't have write access.
564 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
566 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
567 to accommodate leap seconds.
568 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
570 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
571 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
572 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
574 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
576 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
577 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
578 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
580 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
581 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
582 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
583 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
584 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
588 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
589 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
590 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
591 directory or a symlink to a directory.
593 ** Changes in behavior
595 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
596 environment variable is set.
598 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
599 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
600 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
604 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
605 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
606 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
607 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
609 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
610 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
611 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
612 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
616 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
617 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
618 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
620 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
621 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
622 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
623 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
624 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
625 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
628 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
629 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
632 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
636 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
637 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
638 and libraries tested at configure time.
639 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
641 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
642 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
644 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
645 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
647 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
648 printing a summary to stderr.
649 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
651 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
652 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
653 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
655 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
656 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
658 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
659 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
660 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
661 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
663 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
664 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
665 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
666 which is relatively unusual.
667 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
669 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
670 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
671 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
672 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
673 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
674 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
675 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
679 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
680 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
681 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
682 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
683 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
687 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
688 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
690 ** Changes in behavior
692 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
693 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
694 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
695 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
696 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
699 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
703 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
704 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
706 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
707 before data copying has started.
709 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
710 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
712 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
713 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
714 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
715 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
717 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
718 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
719 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
720 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
722 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
727 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
728 for its standard streams.
730 ** Changes in behavior
732 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
733 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
734 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
735 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
736 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
737 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
739 ** Deprecated options
741 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
742 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
746 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
748 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
749 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
752 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
754 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
755 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
757 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
758 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
761 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
765 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
766 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
767 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
768 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
770 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
771 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
772 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
773 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
774 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
779 make check: two tests have been corrected
783 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
784 inherited from gnulib.
787 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
791 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
792 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
793 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
794 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
796 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
797 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
799 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
801 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
802 systems without xattr support.
804 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
805 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
806 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
808 ** Changes in behavior
810 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
811 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
812 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
813 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
815 ** Improved robustness
817 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
818 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
819 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
820 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
821 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
822 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
823 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
824 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
825 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
829 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
830 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
832 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
833 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
834 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
835 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
836 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
839 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
843 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
844 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
845 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
849 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
850 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
851 data was read, or on process exit.
852 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
854 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
855 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
856 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
857 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
859 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
860 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
861 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
862 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
864 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
865 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
867 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
868 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
870 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
871 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
872 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
874 ** Changes in behavior
876 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
877 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
878 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
880 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
881 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
883 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
884 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
885 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
888 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
892 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
894 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
895 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
896 install: Never copies xattrs
898 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
899 from overwriting any existing destination file
901 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
902 mode where this feature is available.
904 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
905 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
906 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
907 do not modify the destination at all.
909 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
911 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
915 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
916 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
918 cp uses much less memory in some situations
920 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
921 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
923 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
924 processing the first file name
926 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
927 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
928 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
929 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
931 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
932 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
934 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
935 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
938 ** Changes in behavior
940 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
941 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
943 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
944 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
945 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
947 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
948 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
950 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
952 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
953 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
954 is still marked with a '+'.
957 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
961 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
962 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
966 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
967 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
968 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
969 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
970 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
971 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
973 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
974 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
976 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
977 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
979 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
981 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
982 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
983 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
985 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
986 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
988 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
989 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
990 used to factor large numbers.
992 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
995 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
997 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
999 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1000 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1002 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1003 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1004 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1005 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1007 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1008 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1009 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1011 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1012 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1016 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1018 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1019 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1021 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1022 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1024 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1026 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1027 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1031 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1032 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1033 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1035 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1037 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1038 no matter how many files are in a given directory
1040 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1041 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1042 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1044 ** Changes in behavior
1046 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1047 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1050 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1054 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1056 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1057 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1058 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1060 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1061 with no USERNAME argument.
1063 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1064 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1065 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1067 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1068 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1069 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1070 number of fields for some inputs.
1072 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1073 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1075 ** Changes in behavior
1077 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1078 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1081 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1085 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1087 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1088 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1089 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1090 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1092 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1093 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1095 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1096 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1098 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1099 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1101 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1102 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1103 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1104 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1106 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1107 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1108 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1109 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1110 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1111 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1113 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1114 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1116 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1117 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1118 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1120 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1121 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1123 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1124 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1126 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1127 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1128 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1129 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1131 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1132 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1134 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1135 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1137 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1138 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1139 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1143 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1144 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1146 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1147 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1148 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1149 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1153 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1154 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1156 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1158 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1162 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1163 which have negative errno values.
1167 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1171 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1175 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1176 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1179 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1183 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1184 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1185 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1187 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1188 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1189 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1190 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1194 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1195 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1196 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1197 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1200 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1204 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1206 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1207 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1208 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1211 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1215 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1216 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1218 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1220 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1222 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1224 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1228 ** Changes in behavior
1230 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1231 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1233 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1234 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1236 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1237 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1238 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1242 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1243 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1244 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1245 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1246 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1247 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1248 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1249 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1250 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1251 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1252 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1254 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1255 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1256 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1259 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1262 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1263 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1264 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1266 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1267 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1268 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1271 ** New build options
1273 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1274 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1275 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1276 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1278 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1279 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1280 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1281 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1282 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1283 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1284 of "make check" fail.
1286 ** Remove deprecated options
1288 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1289 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1290 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1291 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1292 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1294 ** Improved robustness
1296 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1297 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1298 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1299 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1300 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1301 loss of the contents of a/f.
1303 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1304 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1308 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1309 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1310 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1312 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1313 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1314 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1315 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1317 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1318 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1319 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1320 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1321 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1322 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1323 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1324 destination is a symlink.
1326 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1328 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1329 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1331 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1332 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1334 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1336 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1337 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1339 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1340 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1342 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1345 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1346 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1348 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1349 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1351 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1352 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1353 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1354 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1356 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1357 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1358 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1360 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1361 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1362 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1364 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1365 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1366 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1367 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1369 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1370 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1371 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1373 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1374 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1376 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1377 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1379 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1381 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1382 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1383 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1385 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1386 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1388 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1389 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1391 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1392 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1394 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1395 [present in the original version]
1398 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1402 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1404 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1405 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1406 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1408 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1409 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1411 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1415 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1416 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1418 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1419 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1421 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1422 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1424 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1425 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1426 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1427 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1428 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1429 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1431 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1432 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1435 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1436 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1438 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1441 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1442 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1443 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1445 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1446 directory is unreadable.
1448 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1449 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1450 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1452 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1453 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1454 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1455 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1456 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1459 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1460 Before it would print nothing.
1462 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1464 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1465 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1466 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1467 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1468 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1469 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1470 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1471 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1473 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1477 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1478 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1479 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1481 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1482 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1483 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1484 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1487 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1491 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1492 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1493 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1494 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1495 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1496 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1497 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1499 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1500 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1501 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1502 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1503 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1504 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1505 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1506 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1508 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1509 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1510 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1513 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1517 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1518 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1520 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1521 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1522 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1524 ** Improved robustness
1526 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1527 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1528 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1531 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1535 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1536 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1537 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1538 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1539 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1541 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1545 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1548 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1552 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1553 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1554 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1555 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1557 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1558 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1560 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1561 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1562 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1565 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1567 ** Improved robustness
1569 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1570 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1572 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1573 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1574 or NFS-mounted partition.
1576 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1577 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1581 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1582 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1583 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1584 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1585 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1586 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1588 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1589 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1591 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1592 or neglect to report file removal.
1594 For the "groups" command:
1596 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1597 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1599 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1601 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1603 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1607 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1608 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1611 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1613 ** Changes in behavior
1615 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1616 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1617 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1618 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1620 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1621 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1622 a final `./' or `../' component.
1624 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1625 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1626 this only for pipes.
1628 ** Infrastructure changes
1630 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1631 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1632 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1633 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1637 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1638 name is "." or "..".
1640 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1641 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1642 dirent.d_type support.
1644 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1645 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1647 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1648 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1649 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1650 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1653 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1655 ** Changes in behavior
1657 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1661 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1662 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1666 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1667 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1668 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1670 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1671 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1673 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1674 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1676 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1678 ** Improved robustness
1680 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1681 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1682 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1684 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1685 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1688 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1689 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1691 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1692 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1694 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1695 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1697 ** Changes in behavior
1699 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1700 where the two are distinct.
1702 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1703 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1704 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1705 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1706 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1707 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1708 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1709 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1710 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1711 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1712 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1713 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1714 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1715 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1716 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1717 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1718 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1720 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1721 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1722 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1724 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1725 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1726 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1727 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1730 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1731 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1735 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1736 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1737 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1738 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1740 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1741 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1742 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1744 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1745 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1746 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1747 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1748 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1751 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1752 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1754 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1755 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1756 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1757 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1759 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1760 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1761 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1763 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1764 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1765 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1766 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1768 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1769 and sticky) with the -m option.
1771 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1772 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1773 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1774 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1775 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1777 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1778 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1780 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1784 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1785 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1786 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1787 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1789 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1791 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1793 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1794 silently ignoring one of them.
1796 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1797 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1798 containing this change was 5.92.
1800 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1801 automatically newline terminated.
1803 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1804 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1805 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1806 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1809 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1810 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1811 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1814 ** Scheduled for removal
1816 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1817 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1819 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1820 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1821 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1822 command to unlink a directory.
1824 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1825 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1826 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1827 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1831 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1832 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1833 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1834 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1835 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1836 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1840 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1841 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1843 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1845 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1846 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1847 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1849 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1850 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1853 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1854 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1856 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1857 list directories before files.
1859 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1860 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1861 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1862 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1865 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1867 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1869 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1870 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1871 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1873 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1874 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1878 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1879 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1880 usually printing nothing.
1882 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1884 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1885 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1886 them with hard-linked directories.
1888 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1889 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1890 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1892 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1893 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1894 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1896 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1899 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1900 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1902 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1903 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1905 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1906 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1908 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1909 all command-line arguments.
1911 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1913 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1915 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1916 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1918 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1920 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1921 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1922 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1923 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1924 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1926 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1927 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1929 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1930 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1931 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1932 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1934 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1936 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1940 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1941 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1943 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1944 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1946 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1947 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1949 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1950 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1952 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1953 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1955 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1957 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1958 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1959 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1962 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1964 ** Build-related bug fixes
1966 installing .mo files would fail
1969 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1973 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1975 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1978 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1982 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1983 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1987 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1989 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1990 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1992 ** Deprecated options
1994 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1995 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1997 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2001 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2003 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2004 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2005 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2006 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2008 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2011 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2017 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2022 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2024 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2026 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2027 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2028 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2030 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2031 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2032 problematic usages. These include:
2034 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2035 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2036 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2037 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2038 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2039 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2040 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2041 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2042 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2044 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2045 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2047 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2048 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2049 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2050 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2052 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2053 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2054 between binary and text files.
2056 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2060 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2064 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2065 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2067 head tac tail tee tr
2068 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2070 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2071 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2073 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2074 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2075 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2077 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2079 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2081 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2082 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2083 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2087 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2089 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2090 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2092 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2093 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2094 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2098 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2099 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2103 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2104 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2105 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2109 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2110 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2114 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2116 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2118 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2122 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2123 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2124 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2126 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2127 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2128 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2129 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2130 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2132 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2136 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2137 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2138 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2140 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2142 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2143 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2144 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2145 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2147 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2149 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2150 rather than silently wrapping around.
2152 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2153 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2155 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2156 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2158 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2159 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2160 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2161 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2163 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2165 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2167 ** Improved robustness
2169 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2170 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2171 no matter how large the result.
2173 ** Improved portability
2175 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2176 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2178 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2180 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2181 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2182 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2184 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2185 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2189 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2190 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2192 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2194 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2195 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2196 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2197 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2199 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2200 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2202 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2203 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2204 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2206 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2208 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2209 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2211 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2212 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2214 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2216 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2217 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2219 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2220 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2222 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2223 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2224 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2226 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2228 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2230 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2234 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2236 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2237 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2238 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2240 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2241 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2243 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2244 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2245 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2247 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2248 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2250 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2251 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2252 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2253 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2255 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2256 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2258 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2259 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2260 the file system does not support it.
2262 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2264 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2265 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2267 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2269 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2270 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2272 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2273 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2274 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2275 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2277 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2278 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2281 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2282 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2283 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2284 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2286 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2287 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2288 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2289 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2291 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2292 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2294 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2296 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2297 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2298 reporting incorrect results.
2302 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2303 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2305 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2308 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2310 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2311 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2313 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2314 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2316 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2319 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2320 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2321 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2322 the file name does not look like a page range.
2324 printf has several changes:
2326 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2327 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2329 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2330 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2331 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2333 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2334 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2337 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2338 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2340 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2341 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2343 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2345 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2346 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2348 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2350 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2352 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2353 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2354 when first encountering the directory.
2358 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2359 output; POSIX requires this.
2361 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2362 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2364 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2366 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2367 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2369 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2370 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2372 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2373 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2374 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2375 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2376 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2377 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2378 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2380 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2381 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2382 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2384 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2385 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2387 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2389 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2391 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2392 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2393 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2394 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2396 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2400 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2401 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2402 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2403 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2404 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2406 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2407 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2408 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2410 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2411 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2413 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2414 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2416 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2417 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2418 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2419 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2420 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2422 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2423 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2425 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2426 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2428 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2430 nocreat do not create the output file
2431 excl fail if the output file already exists
2432 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2433 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2435 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2437 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2438 direct use direct I/O for data
2439 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2440 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2441 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2442 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2443 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2445 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2447 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2448 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2451 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2452 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2453 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2454 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2455 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2456 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2458 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2459 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2461 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2464 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2466 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2468 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2469 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2471 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2472 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2473 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2475 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2476 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2477 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2479 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2481 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2482 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2484 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2485 for compatibility with bash.
2487 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2489 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2490 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2491 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2492 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2494 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2495 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2497 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2498 ls supports TABSIZE.
2499 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2500 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2501 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2503 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2506 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2508 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2509 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2510 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2511 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2512 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2513 an offset, not as a file name.
2515 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2516 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2518 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2519 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2521 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2522 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2524 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2525 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2526 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2528 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2529 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2531 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2532 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2536 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2538 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2540 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2544 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2545 or more arguments between partitions.
2547 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2548 holes in the destination.
2550 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2551 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2552 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2553 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2554 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2555 terminates immediately.
2557 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2559 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2561 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2562 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2563 not the empty string.
2565 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2566 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2570 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2571 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2572 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2575 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2582 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2586 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2587 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2589 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2590 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2592 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2593 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2594 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2597 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2601 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2602 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2604 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2605 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2607 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2608 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2609 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2611 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2613 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2616 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2618 ** Configuration option
2620 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2621 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2625 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2626 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2630 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2631 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2632 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2635 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2636 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2637 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2638 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2639 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2640 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2641 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2644 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2648 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2649 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2650 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2652 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2653 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2655 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2657 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2658 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2659 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2660 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2662 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2664 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2665 not just the ones that reference directories
2667 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2668 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2670 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2671 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2672 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2674 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2675 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2676 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2677 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2678 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2679 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2681 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2686 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2687 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2689 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2691 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2693 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2695 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2696 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2698 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2699 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2701 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2703 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2707 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2709 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2711 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2712 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2713 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2714 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2715 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2717 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2718 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2720 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2721 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2723 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2724 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2726 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2727 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2728 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2732 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2733 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2734 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2735 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2736 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2737 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2738 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2739 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2740 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2741 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2742 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2743 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2744 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2745 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2747 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2749 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2750 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2752 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2754 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2756 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2757 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2759 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2761 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2762 without a trailing newline.
2764 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2765 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2767 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2770 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2774 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2776 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2778 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2779 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2780 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2781 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2783 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2785 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2786 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2787 be printed without leading spaces.
2789 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2790 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2795 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2796 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2797 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2799 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2801 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2802 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2804 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2805 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2807 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2808 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2810 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2812 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2814 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2816 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2817 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2819 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2821 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2823 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2824 byte offsets are specified.
2827 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2830 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2833 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2834 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2835 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2836 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2837 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2838 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2839 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2840 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2841 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2842 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2843 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2844 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2845 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2846 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2847 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2848 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2849 directory where M has write access.
2850 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2851 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2852 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2855 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2856 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2857 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2858 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2859 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2860 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2861 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2862 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2863 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2864 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2865 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2866 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2867 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2868 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2869 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2870 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2871 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2872 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2873 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2874 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2875 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2876 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2877 appeared one additional time.
2879 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2880 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2881 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2882 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2885 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2886 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2887 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2888 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2889 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2890 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2891 if there were more than 338.
2893 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2894 - false --help now exits nonzero
2897 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2898 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2899 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2900 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2903 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2904 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2905 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2906 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2907 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2910 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2911 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2912 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2913 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2914 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2915 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2916 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2919 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2920 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2921 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2922 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2923 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2924 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2926 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2927 under certain unusual conditions
2928 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2929 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2932 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2933 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2934 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2935 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2936 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2937 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2938 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2939 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2940 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2941 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2942 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2943 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2944 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2945 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2946 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2947 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2950 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2951 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2954 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2955 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2956 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2957 involving hard-linked directories
2958 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2959 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2960 character-special and block files
2963 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2964 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2965 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2966 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2967 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2968 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2969 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2970 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2971 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2973 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2974 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2975 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2976 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2977 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2978 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2979 specified on the command line.
2980 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2981 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2982 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2983 the first file untouched.
2984 * readlink: new program
2985 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2986 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2987 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2988 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2989 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2990 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2993 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2994 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2995 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2996 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2997 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2998 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2999 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3000 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3001 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3002 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3003 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3004 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3006 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3007 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3008 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3010 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3011 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3012 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3013 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3014 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3015 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3016 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3017 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3020 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3021 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3024 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3025 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3026 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3027 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3028 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3029 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3030 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3033 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3034 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3036 ========================================================================
3037 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3038 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3041 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3043 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3044 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3045 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3046 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3047 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3048 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3049 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3050 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3051 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3052 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3053 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3054 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3056 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3057 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3058 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3059 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3061 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3064 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3066 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3067 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3068 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3069 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3070 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3071 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3072 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3075 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3076 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3077 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3078 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3079 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3080 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3081 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3082 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3083 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3084 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3085 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3086 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3087 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3088 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3089 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3090 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3092 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3093 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3095 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3096 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3097 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3098 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3099 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3100 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3102 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3103 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3104 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3105 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3106 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3107 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3108 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3110 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3111 the source files in the following example:
3112 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3113 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3114 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3115 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3116 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3117 links between source files with --preserve=links
3118 * cp accepts new options:
3119 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3120 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3121 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3122 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3123 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3124 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3125 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3126 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3127 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3129 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3130 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3131 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3132 even though it's older than dest.
3133 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3134 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3135 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3136 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3137 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3139 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3140 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3141 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3142 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3143 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3144 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3145 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3147 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3148 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3149 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3151 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3152 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3153 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3154 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3155 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3156 This is the default.
3158 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3159 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3160 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3161 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3162 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3164 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3167 ========================================================================
3168 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3169 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3172 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3173 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3175 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3176 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3177 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3178 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3179 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3181 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3182 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3183 that specifies a non-directory
3186 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3187 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3188 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3189 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3190 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3191 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3192 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3193 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3194 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3195 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3196 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3197 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3198 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3199 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3200 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3201 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3202 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3203 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3204 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3205 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3206 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3207 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3208 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3209 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3211 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3212 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3213 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3215 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3217 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3218 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3220 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3221 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3222 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3223 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3224 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3226 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3227 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3228 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3229 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3230 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3232 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3234 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3235 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3236 * still more portability fixes
3237 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3238 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3240 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3242 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3244 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3246 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3247 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3248 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3249 there is any time remaining
3250 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3252 ========================================================================
3253 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3254 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3256 This package began as the union of the following:
3257 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3259 ========================================================================
3261 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3263 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3264 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3265 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3266 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3267 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3268 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.