1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
8 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
10 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
13 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
14 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
16 ** Changes in behavior
18 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
19 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
20 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
21 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
22 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
23 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
24 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
25 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
27 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
29 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
30 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
31 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning.
33 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
34 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
35 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
37 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
38 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
39 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
42 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
46 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
47 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
49 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
51 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
52 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
54 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
55 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
56 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
57 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
59 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
60 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
61 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
65 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
66 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
68 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
69 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
70 duration after the initial signal was sent.
72 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
73 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
74 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
75 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
76 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
77 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
78 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
79 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
80 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
82 ** Changes in behavior
84 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
85 sequence when it would be a no-op.
87 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
88 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
91 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
95 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
96 of available processors, which may not have been the case
97 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
98 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
102 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
103 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
105 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
106 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
107 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
108 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
110 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
111 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
112 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
115 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
119 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
120 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
121 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
123 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
124 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
125 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
127 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
128 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
130 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
131 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
132 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
133 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
135 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
136 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
137 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
139 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
140 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
141 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
142 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
144 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
145 renamed-aside and then recreated.
146 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
148 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
149 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
150 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
151 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
153 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
154 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
155 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
157 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
158 processes will not intersperse their output.
159 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
162 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
166 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
167 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
169 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
170 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
172 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
173 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
174 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
175 the presence of the empty string argument.
176 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
178 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
179 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
180 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
181 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
183 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
184 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
186 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
187 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
188 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
190 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
191 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
192 and with a malicious user on the same system
193 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
194 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
197 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
201 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
202 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
203 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
205 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
206 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
207 offending directory and all "contents."
209 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
210 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
211 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
213 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
214 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
215 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
217 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
218 processes will not intersperse their output.
219 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
220 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
222 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
223 output the name of the file to stdout.
224 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
226 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
227 call fails with errno == EACCES.
228 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
230 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
231 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
234 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
235 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
236 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
238 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
239 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
240 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
241 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
242 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
243 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
245 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
246 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
247 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
248 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
250 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
251 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
253 ** Changes in behavior
255 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
256 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
257 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
258 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
259 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
261 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
262 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
263 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
264 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
266 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
268 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
269 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
270 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
271 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
272 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
276 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
280 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
281 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
283 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
284 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
286 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
287 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
288 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
290 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
291 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
294 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
298 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
299 when the source file doesn't have write access.
300 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
302 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
303 to accommodate leap seconds.
304 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
306 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
307 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
308 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
310 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
312 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
313 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
314 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
316 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
317 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
318 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
319 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
320 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
324 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
325 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
326 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
327 directory or a symlink to a directory.
329 ** Changes in behavior
331 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
332 environment variable is set.
334 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
335 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
336 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
340 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
341 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
342 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
343 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
345 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
346 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
347 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
348 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
352 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
353 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
354 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
356 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
357 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
358 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
359 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
360 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
361 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
364 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
365 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
368 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
372 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
373 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
374 and libraries tested at configure time.
375 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
377 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
378 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
380 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
381 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
383 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
384 printing a summary to stderr.
385 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
387 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
388 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
389 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
391 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
392 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
394 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
395 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
396 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
397 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
399 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
400 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
401 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
402 which is relatively unusual.
403 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
405 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
406 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
407 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
408 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
409 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
410 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
411 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
415 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
416 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
417 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
418 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
419 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
423 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
424 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
426 ** Changes in behavior
428 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
429 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
430 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
431 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
432 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
435 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
439 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
440 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
442 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
443 before data copying has started.
445 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
446 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
448 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
449 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
450 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
451 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
453 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
454 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
455 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
456 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
458 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
463 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
464 for its standard streams.
466 ** Changes in behavior
468 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
469 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
470 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
471 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
472 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
473 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
475 ** Deprecated options
477 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
478 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
482 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
484 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
485 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
488 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
490 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
491 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
493 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
494 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
497 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
501 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
502 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
503 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
504 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
506 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
507 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
508 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
509 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
510 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
515 make check: two tests have been corrected
519 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
520 inherited from gnulib.
523 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
527 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
528 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
529 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
530 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
532 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
533 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
535 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
537 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
538 systems without xattr support.
540 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
541 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
542 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
544 ** Changes in behavior
546 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
547 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
548 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
549 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
551 ** Improved robustness
553 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
554 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
555 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
556 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
557 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
558 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
559 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
560 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
561 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
565 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
566 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
568 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
569 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
570 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
571 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
572 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
575 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
579 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
580 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
581 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
585 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
586 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
587 data was read, or on process exit.
588 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
590 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
591 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
592 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
593 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
595 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
596 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
597 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
598 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
600 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
601 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
603 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
604 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
606 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
607 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
608 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
610 ** Changes in behavior
612 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
613 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
614 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
616 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
617 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
619 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
620 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
621 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
624 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
628 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
630 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
631 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
632 install: Never copies xattrs
634 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
635 from overwriting any existing destination file
637 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
638 mode where this feature is available.
640 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
641 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
642 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
643 do not modify the destination at all.
645 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
647 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
651 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
652 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
654 cp uses much less memory in some situations
656 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
657 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
659 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
660 processing the first file name
662 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
663 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
664 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
665 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
667 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
668 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
670 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
671 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
674 ** Changes in behavior
676 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
677 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
679 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
680 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
681 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
683 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
684 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
686 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
688 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
689 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
690 is still marked with a '+'.
693 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
697 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
698 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
702 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
703 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
704 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
705 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
706 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
707 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
709 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
710 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
712 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
713 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
715 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
717 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
718 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
719 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
721 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
722 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
724 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
725 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
726 used to factor large numbers.
728 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
731 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
733 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
735 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
736 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
738 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
739 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
740 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
741 maximum command-line (argv) length.
743 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
744 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
745 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
747 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
748 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
752 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
754 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
755 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
757 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
758 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
760 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
762 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
763 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
767 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
768 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
769 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
771 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
773 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
774 no matter how many files are in a given directory
776 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
777 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
778 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
780 ** Changes in behavior
782 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
783 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
786 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
790 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
792 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
793 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
794 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
796 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
797 with no USERNAME argument.
799 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
800 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
801 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
803 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
804 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
805 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
806 number of fields for some inputs.
808 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
809 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
811 ** Changes in behavior
813 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
814 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
817 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
821 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
823 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
824 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
825 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
826 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
828 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
829 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
831 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
832 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
834 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
835 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
837 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
838 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
839 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
840 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
842 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
843 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
844 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
845 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
846 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
847 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
849 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
850 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
852 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
853 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
854 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
856 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
857 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
859 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
860 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
862 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
863 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
864 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
865 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
867 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
868 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
870 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
871 in more cases when a directory is empty.
873 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
874 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
875 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
879 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
880 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
882 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
883 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
884 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
885 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
889 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
890 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
892 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
894 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
898 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
899 which have negative errno values.
903 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
907 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
911 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
912 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
915 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
919 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
920 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
921 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
923 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
924 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
925 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
926 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
930 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
931 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
932 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
933 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
936 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
940 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
942 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
943 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
944 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
947 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
951 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
952 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
954 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
956 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
958 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
960 ** Programs no longer installed by default
964 ** Changes in behavior
966 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
967 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
969 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
970 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
972 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
973 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
974 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
978 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
979 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
980 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
981 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
982 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
983 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
984 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
985 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
986 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
987 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
988 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
990 The following commands and options now support the standard size
991 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
992 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
995 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
998 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
999 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1000 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1002 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1003 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1004 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1007 ** New build options
1009 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1010 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1011 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1012 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1014 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1015 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1016 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1017 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1018 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1019 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1020 of "make check" fail.
1022 ** Remove deprecated options
1024 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1025 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1026 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1027 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1028 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1030 ** Improved robustness
1032 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1033 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1034 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1035 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1036 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1037 loss of the contents of a/f.
1039 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1040 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1044 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1045 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1046 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1048 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1049 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1050 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1051 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1053 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1054 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1055 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1056 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1057 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1058 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1059 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1060 destination is a symlink.
1062 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1064 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1065 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1067 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1068 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1070 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1072 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1073 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1075 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1076 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1078 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1081 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1082 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1084 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1085 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1087 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1088 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1089 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1090 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1092 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1093 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1094 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1096 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1097 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1098 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1100 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1101 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1102 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1103 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1105 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1106 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1107 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1109 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1110 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1112 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1113 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1115 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1117 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1118 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1119 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1121 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1122 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1124 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1125 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1127 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1128 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1130 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1131 [present in the original version]
1134 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1138 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1140 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1141 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1142 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1144 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1145 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1147 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1151 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1152 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1154 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1155 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1157 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1158 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1160 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1161 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1162 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1163 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1164 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1165 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1167 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1168 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1171 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1172 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1174 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1177 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1178 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1179 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1181 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1182 directory is unreadable.
1184 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1185 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1186 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1188 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1189 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1190 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1191 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1192 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1195 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1196 Before it would print nothing.
1198 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1200 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1201 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1202 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1203 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1204 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1205 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1206 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1207 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1209 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1213 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1214 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1215 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1217 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1218 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1219 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1220 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1223 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1227 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1228 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1229 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1230 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1231 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1232 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1233 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1235 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1236 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1237 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1238 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1239 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1240 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1241 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1242 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1244 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1245 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1246 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1249 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1253 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1254 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1256 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1257 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1258 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1260 ** Improved robustness
1262 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1263 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1264 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1267 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1271 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1272 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1273 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1274 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1275 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1277 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1281 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1284 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1288 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1289 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1290 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1291 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1293 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1294 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1296 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1297 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1298 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1301 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1303 ** Improved robustness
1305 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1306 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1308 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1309 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1310 or NFS-mounted partition.
1312 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1313 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1317 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1318 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1319 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1320 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1321 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1322 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1324 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1325 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1327 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1328 or neglect to report file removal.
1330 For the "groups" command:
1332 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1333 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1335 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1337 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1339 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1343 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1344 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1347 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1349 ** Changes in behavior
1351 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1352 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1353 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1354 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1356 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1357 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1358 a final `./' or `../' component.
1360 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1361 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1362 this only for pipes.
1364 ** Infrastructure changes
1366 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1367 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1368 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1369 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1373 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1374 name is "." or "..".
1376 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1377 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1378 dirent.d_type support.
1380 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1381 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1383 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1384 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1385 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1386 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1389 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1391 ** Changes in behavior
1393 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1397 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1398 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1402 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1403 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1404 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1406 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1407 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1409 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1410 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1412 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1414 ** Improved robustness
1416 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1417 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1418 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1420 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1421 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1424 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1425 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1427 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1428 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1430 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1431 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1433 ** Changes in behavior
1435 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1436 where the two are distinct.
1438 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1439 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1440 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1441 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1442 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1443 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1444 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1445 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1446 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1447 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1448 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1449 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1450 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1451 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1452 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1453 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1454 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1456 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1457 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1458 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1460 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1461 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1462 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1463 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1466 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1467 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1471 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1472 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1473 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1474 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1476 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1477 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1478 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1480 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1481 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1482 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1483 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1484 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1487 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1488 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1490 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1491 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1492 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1493 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1495 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1496 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1497 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1499 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1500 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1501 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1502 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1504 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1505 and sticky) with the -m option.
1507 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1508 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1509 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1510 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1511 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1513 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1514 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1516 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1520 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1521 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1522 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1523 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1525 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1527 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1529 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1530 silently ignoring one of them.
1532 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1533 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1534 containing this change was 5.92.
1536 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1537 automatically newline terminated.
1539 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1540 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1541 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1542 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1545 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1546 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1547 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1550 ** Scheduled for removal
1552 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1553 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1555 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1556 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1557 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1558 command to unlink a directory.
1560 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1561 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1562 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1563 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1567 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1568 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1569 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1570 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1571 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1572 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1576 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1577 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1579 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1581 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1582 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1583 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1585 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1586 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1589 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1590 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1592 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1593 list directories before files.
1595 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1596 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1597 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1598 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1601 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1603 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1605 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1606 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1607 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1609 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1610 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1614 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1615 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1616 usually printing nothing.
1618 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1620 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1621 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1622 them with hard-linked directories.
1624 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1625 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1626 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1628 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1629 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1630 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1632 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1635 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1636 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1638 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1639 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1641 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1642 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1644 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1645 all command-line arguments.
1647 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1649 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1651 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1652 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1654 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1656 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1657 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1658 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1659 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1660 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1662 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1663 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1665 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1666 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1667 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1668 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1670 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1672 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1676 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1677 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1679 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1680 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1682 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1683 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1685 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1686 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1688 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1689 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1691 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1693 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1694 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1695 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1698 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1700 ** Build-related bug fixes
1702 installing .mo files would fail
1705 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1709 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1711 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1714 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1718 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1719 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1723 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1725 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1726 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1728 ** Deprecated options
1730 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1731 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1733 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1737 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1739 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1740 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1741 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1742 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1744 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1747 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1753 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1758 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1760 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1762 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1763 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1764 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1766 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1767 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1768 problematic usages. These include:
1770 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1771 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1772 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1773 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1774 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1775 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1776 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1777 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1778 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1780 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1781 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1783 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1784 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1785 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1786 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1788 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1789 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1790 between binary and text files.
1792 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1796 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1800 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1801 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1803 head tac tail tee tr
1804 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1806 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1807 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1809 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1810 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1811 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1813 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1815 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1817 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1818 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1819 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1823 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1825 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1826 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1828 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1829 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1830 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1834 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1835 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1839 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1840 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1841 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1845 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1846 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1850 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1852 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1854 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1858 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1859 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1860 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1862 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1863 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1864 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1865 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1866 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1868 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
1872 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
1873 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
1874 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
1876 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
1878 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
1879 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
1880 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
1881 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
1883 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
1885 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
1886 rather than silently wrapping around.
1888 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
1889 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
1891 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
1892 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
1894 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
1895 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
1896 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
1897 file /tmp/a/b/file".
1899 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
1901 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
1903 ** Improved robustness
1905 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
1906 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
1907 no matter how large the result.
1909 ** Improved portability
1911 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
1912 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
1914 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
1916 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
1917 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
1918 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
1920 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
1921 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
1925 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
1926 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
1928 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
1930 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
1931 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
1932 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
1933 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
1935 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
1936 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
1938 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
1939 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
1940 categories if not specified by dircolors.
1942 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
1944 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
1945 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
1947 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
1948 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
1950 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
1952 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
1953 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
1955 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
1956 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
1958 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
1959 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
1960 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
1962 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
1964 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
1966 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
1970 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
1972 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
1973 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
1974 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
1976 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
1977 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
1979 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
1980 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
1981 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
1983 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
1984 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
1986 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
1987 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
1988 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
1989 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
1991 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
1992 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
1994 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
1995 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
1996 the file system does not support it.
1998 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2000 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2001 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2003 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2005 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2006 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2008 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2009 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2010 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2011 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2013 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2014 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2017 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2018 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2019 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2020 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2022 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2023 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2024 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2025 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2027 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2028 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2030 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2032 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2033 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2034 reporting incorrect results.
2038 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2039 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2041 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2044 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2046 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2047 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2049 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2050 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2052 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2055 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2056 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2057 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2058 the file name does not look like a page range.
2060 printf has several changes:
2062 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2063 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2065 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2066 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2067 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2069 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2070 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2073 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2074 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2076 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2077 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2079 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2081 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2082 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2084 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2086 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2088 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2089 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2090 when first encountering the directory.
2094 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2095 output; POSIX requires this.
2097 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2098 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2100 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2102 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2103 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2105 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2106 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2108 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2109 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2110 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2111 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2112 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2113 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2114 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2116 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2117 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2118 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2120 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2121 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2123 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2125 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2127 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2128 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2129 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2130 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2132 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2136 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2137 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2138 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2139 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2140 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2142 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2143 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2144 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2146 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2147 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2149 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2150 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2152 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2153 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2154 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2155 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2156 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2158 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2159 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2161 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2162 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2164 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2166 nocreat do not create the output file
2167 excl fail if the output file already exists
2168 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2169 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2171 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2173 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2174 direct use direct I/O for data
2175 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2176 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2177 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2178 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2179 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2181 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2183 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2184 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2187 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2188 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2189 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2190 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2191 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2192 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2194 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2195 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2197 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2200 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2202 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2204 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2205 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2207 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2208 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2209 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2211 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2212 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2213 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2215 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2217 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2218 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2220 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2221 for compatibility with bash.
2223 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2225 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2226 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2227 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2228 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2230 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2231 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2233 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2234 ls supports TABSIZE.
2235 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2236 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2237 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2239 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2242 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2244 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2245 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2246 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2247 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2248 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2249 an offset, not as a file name.
2251 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2252 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2254 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2255 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2257 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2258 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2260 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2261 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2262 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2264 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2265 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2267 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2268 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2272 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2274 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2276 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2280 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2281 or more arguments between partitions.
2283 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2284 holes in the destination.
2286 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2287 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2288 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2289 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2290 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2291 terminates immediately.
2293 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2295 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2297 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2298 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2299 not the empty string.
2301 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2302 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2306 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2307 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2308 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2311 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2318 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2322 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2323 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2325 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2326 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2328 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2329 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2330 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2333 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2337 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2338 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2340 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2341 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2343 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2344 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2345 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2347 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2349 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2352 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2354 ** Configuration option
2356 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2357 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2361 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2362 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2366 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2367 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2368 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2371 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2372 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2373 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2374 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2375 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2376 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2377 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2380 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2384 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2385 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2386 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2388 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2389 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2391 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2393 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2394 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2395 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2396 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2398 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2400 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2401 not just the ones that reference directories
2403 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2404 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2406 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2407 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2408 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2410 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2411 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2412 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2413 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2414 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2415 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2417 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2422 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2423 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2425 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2427 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2429 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2431 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2432 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2434 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2435 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2437 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2439 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2443 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2445 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2447 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2448 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2449 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2450 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2451 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2453 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2454 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2456 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2457 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2459 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2460 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2462 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2463 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2464 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2468 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2469 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2470 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2471 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2472 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2473 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2474 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2475 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2476 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2477 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2478 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2479 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2480 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2481 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2483 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2485 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2486 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2488 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2490 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2492 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2493 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2495 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2497 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2498 without a trailing newline.
2500 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2501 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2503 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2506 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2510 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2512 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2514 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2515 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2516 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2517 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2519 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2521 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2522 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2523 be printed without leading spaces.
2525 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2526 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2531 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2532 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2533 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2535 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2537 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2538 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2540 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2541 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2543 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2544 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2546 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2548 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2550 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2552 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2553 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2555 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2557 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2559 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2560 byte offsets are specified.
2563 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2566 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2569 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2570 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2571 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2572 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2573 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2574 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2575 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2576 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2577 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2578 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2579 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2580 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2581 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2582 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2583 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2584 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2585 directory where M has write access.
2586 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2587 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2588 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2591 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2592 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2593 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2594 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2595 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2596 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2597 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2598 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2599 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2600 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2601 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2602 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2603 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2604 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2605 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2606 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2607 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2608 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2609 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2610 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2611 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2612 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2613 appeared one additional time.
2615 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2616 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2617 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2618 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2621 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2622 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2623 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2624 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2625 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2626 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2627 if there were more than 338.
2629 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2630 - false --help now exits nonzero
2633 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2634 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2635 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2636 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2639 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2640 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2641 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2642 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2643 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2646 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2647 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2648 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2649 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2650 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2651 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2652 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2655 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2656 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2657 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2658 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2659 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2660 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2662 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2663 under certain unusual conditions
2664 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2665 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2668 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2669 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2670 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2671 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2672 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2673 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2674 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2675 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2676 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2677 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2678 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2679 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2680 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2681 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2682 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2683 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2686 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2687 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2690 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2691 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2692 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2693 involving hard-linked directories
2694 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2695 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2696 character-special and block files
2699 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2700 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2701 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2702 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2703 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2704 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2705 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2706 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2707 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2709 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2710 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2711 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2712 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2713 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2714 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2715 specified on the command line.
2716 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2717 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2718 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2719 the first file untouched.
2720 * readlink: new program
2721 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2722 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2723 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2724 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2725 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2726 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2729 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2730 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2731 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2732 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2733 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2734 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2735 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2736 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2737 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2738 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2739 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2740 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2742 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2743 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2744 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2746 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2747 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2748 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2749 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2750 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2751 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2752 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2753 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2756 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2757 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2760 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2761 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2762 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2763 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2764 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2765 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2766 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2769 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2770 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2772 ========================================================================
2773 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2774 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2777 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2779 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2780 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2781 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2782 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2783 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2784 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2785 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2786 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2787 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2788 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2789 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2790 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2792 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2793 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2794 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2795 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2797 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2800 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2802 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2803 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2804 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2805 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2806 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2807 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2808 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2811 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2812 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2813 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2814 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2815 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2816 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2817 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2818 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2819 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2820 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2821 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2822 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2823 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2824 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2825 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2826 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2828 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2829 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2831 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2832 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2833 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2834 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2835 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2836 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2838 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2839 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2840 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2841 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2842 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2843 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2844 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2846 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2847 the source files in the following example:
2848 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2849 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2850 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2851 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2852 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2853 links between source files with --preserve=links
2854 * cp accepts new options:
2855 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2856 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2857 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2858 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2859 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2860 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2861 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2862 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2863 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2865 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2866 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2867 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2868 even though it's older than dest.
2869 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
2870 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
2871 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
2872 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
2873 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
2875 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
2876 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
2877 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
2878 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
2879 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
2880 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
2881 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
2883 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
2884 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
2885 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
2887 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
2888 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
2889 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
2890 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
2891 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
2892 This is the default.
2894 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
2895 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
2896 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
2897 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
2898 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
2900 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
2903 ========================================================================
2904 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
2905 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2908 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
2909 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
2911 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2912 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
2913 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
2914 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
2915 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
2917 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
2918 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
2919 that specifies a non-directory
2922 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
2923 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
2924 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
2925 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
2926 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2927 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
2928 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
2929 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2930 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
2931 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
2932 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
2933 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
2934 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
2935 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
2936 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
2937 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
2938 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
2939 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
2940 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
2941 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
2942 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
2943 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
2944 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
2945 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
2947 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
2948 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
2949 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
2951 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
2953 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
2954 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
2956 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
2957 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
2958 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
2959 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
2960 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
2962 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
2963 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
2964 required support; from Bruno Haible.
2965 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
2966 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
2968 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
2970 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
2971 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
2972 * still more portability fixes
2973 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
2974 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2976 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
2978 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
2980 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
2982 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
2983 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
2984 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
2985 there is any time remaining
2986 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
2988 ========================================================================
2989 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2990 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
2992 This package began as the union of the following:
2993 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
2995 ========================================================================
2997 Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
2999 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3000 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3001 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3002 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3003 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3004 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.