1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 When recursing, chmod -R no longer gets confused into following a symlink
8 if some other process simultaneously replaces a non-symlink with a symlink.
9 The fix is effective on modern hosts with the fchmodat or lchmod syscalls.
10 [bug introduced in the beginning]
12 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
16 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
17 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
18 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
19 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
20 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
21 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
22 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
23 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
25 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
26 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
27 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
28 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
29 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
31 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
32 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
34 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
35 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
37 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
38 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
40 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
41 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
43 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
44 additional static suffix to output file names.
46 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
47 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
48 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
50 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
51 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
55 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
56 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
57 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
59 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
60 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
61 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
62 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
63 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
64 typically still point to one of the hard links.
66 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
67 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
68 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
69 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
70 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
72 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
73 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
74 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
75 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
79 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
80 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
81 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
83 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
84 instead of causing a usage failure.
86 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
89 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
93 realpath: print resolved file names.
97 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
98 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
100 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
101 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
103 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
104 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
105 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
106 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
107 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
108 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
110 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
111 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
112 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
114 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
115 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
116 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
118 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
119 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
120 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
121 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
122 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
124 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
126 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
127 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
129 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
130 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
131 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
133 ** Changes in behavior
135 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
136 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
137 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
138 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
139 usually-short referent instead.
141 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
142 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
143 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
144 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
147 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
151 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
152 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
153 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
155 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
156 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
158 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
159 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
163 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
164 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
166 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
167 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
168 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
169 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
171 ** Changes in behavior
173 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
174 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
175 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
179 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
180 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
181 only .tar.xz files is enough.
184 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
188 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
189 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
190 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
192 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
193 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
195 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
196 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
197 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
198 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
199 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
201 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
202 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
203 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
204 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
205 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
206 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
207 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
208 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
210 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
211 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
213 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
214 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
216 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
217 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
219 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
220 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
221 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
223 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
224 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
225 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
226 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
228 ** Changes in behavior
230 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
231 when -v or -c specified.
233 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
234 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
238 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
239 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
240 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
241 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
242 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
244 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
245 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
246 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
248 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
249 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
250 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
251 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
252 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
253 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
254 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
256 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
257 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
258 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
262 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
263 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
265 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
268 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
269 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
271 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
272 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
274 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
275 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
277 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
279 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
283 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
284 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
286 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
289 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
293 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
294 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
296 ** Changes in behavior
298 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
299 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
300 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
301 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
302 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
303 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
305 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
306 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
307 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
311 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
314 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
318 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
319 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
320 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
322 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
323 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
324 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
326 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
327 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
328 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
330 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
331 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
333 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
334 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
336 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
337 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
339 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
340 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
344 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
345 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
346 processed portion thereof.
348 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
349 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
351 ** Changes in behavior
353 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
354 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
355 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
357 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
358 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
359 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
361 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
362 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
364 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
365 Use --preserve-context instead.
367 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
370 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
374 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
375 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
376 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
377 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
378 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
380 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
381 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
383 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
384 reject file names invalid for that file system.
386 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
387 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
391 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
392 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
393 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
394 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
395 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
396 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
397 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
398 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
400 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
401 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
402 the same number of fields are output for each line.
404 ** Changes in behavior
406 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
407 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
408 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
411 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
415 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
416 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
417 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
420 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
424 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
425 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
427 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
428 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
430 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
431 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
433 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
434 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
435 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
436 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
438 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
439 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
441 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
442 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
443 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
445 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
447 ** Changes in behavior
449 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
450 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
451 to the number of available processors.
455 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
458 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
462 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
463 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
464 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
465 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
467 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
468 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
469 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
471 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
472 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
474 ** Changes in behavior
476 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
477 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
479 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
480 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
481 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
482 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
483 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
484 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
486 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
487 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
488 the same way as the others.
491 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
495 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
496 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
497 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
499 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
500 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
502 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
503 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
504 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
506 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
507 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
509 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
510 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
512 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
513 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
514 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
516 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
517 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
518 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
519 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
523 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
524 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
526 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
529 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
530 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
532 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
534 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
535 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
536 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
538 ** Changes in behavior
540 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
541 rather than its aliased target.
543 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
544 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
545 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
547 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
548 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
549 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
550 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
551 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
552 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
553 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
554 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
556 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
558 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
560 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
561 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
564 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
565 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
566 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
567 control like taskset for example.
569 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
571 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
572 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
573 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
574 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
575 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
576 includes %C when context information is available.
578 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
579 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
580 rather than a file system attribute.
582 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
583 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
584 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
585 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
587 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
588 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
589 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
591 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
592 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
593 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
596 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
600 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
601 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
603 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
605 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
606 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
608 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
609 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
610 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
611 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
613 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
614 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
615 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
619 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
620 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
622 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
623 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
624 duration after the initial signal was sent.
626 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
627 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
628 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
629 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
630 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
631 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
632 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
633 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
634 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
636 ** Changes in behavior
638 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
639 sequence when it would be a no-op.
641 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
642 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
645 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
649 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
650 of available processors, which may not have been the case
651 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
652 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
656 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
657 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
659 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
660 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
661 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
662 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
664 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
665 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
666 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
669 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
673 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
674 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
675 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
677 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
678 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
679 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
681 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
682 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
684 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
685 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
686 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
687 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
689 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
690 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
691 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
693 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
694 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
695 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
696 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
698 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
699 renamed-aside and then recreated.
700 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
702 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
703 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
704 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
705 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
707 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
708 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
709 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
711 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
712 processes will not intersperse their output.
713 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
716 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
720 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
721 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
723 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
724 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
726 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
727 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
728 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
729 the presence of the empty string argument.
730 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
732 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
733 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
734 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
735 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
737 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
738 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
740 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
741 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
742 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
744 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
745 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
746 and with a malicious user on the same system
747 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
748 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
751 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
755 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
756 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
757 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
759 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
760 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
761 offending directory and all "contents."
763 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
764 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
765 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
767 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
768 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
769 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
771 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
772 processes will not intersperse their output.
773 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
774 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
776 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
777 output the name of the file to stdout.
778 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
780 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
781 call fails with errno == EACCES.
782 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
784 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
785 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
788 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
789 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
790 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
792 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
793 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
794 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
795 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
796 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
797 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
799 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
800 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
801 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
802 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
804 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
805 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
807 ** Changes in behavior
809 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
810 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
811 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
812 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
813 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
815 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
816 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
817 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
818 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
820 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
822 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
823 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
824 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
825 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
826 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
830 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
834 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
835 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
837 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
838 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
840 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
841 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
842 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
844 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
845 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
848 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
852 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
853 when the source file doesn't have write access.
854 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
856 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
857 to accommodate leap seconds.
858 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
860 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
861 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
862 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
864 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
866 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
867 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
868 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
870 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
871 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
872 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
873 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
874 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
878 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
879 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
880 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
881 directory or a symlink to a directory.
883 ** Changes in behavior
885 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
886 environment variable is set.
888 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
889 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
890 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
894 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
895 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
896 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
897 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
899 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
900 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
901 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
902 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
906 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
907 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
908 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
910 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
911 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
912 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
913 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
914 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
915 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
918 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
919 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
922 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
926 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
927 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
928 and libraries tested at configure time.
929 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
931 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
932 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
934 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
935 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
937 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
938 printing a summary to stderr.
939 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
941 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
942 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
943 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
945 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
946 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
948 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
949 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
950 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
951 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
953 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
954 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
955 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
956 which is relatively unusual.
957 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
959 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
960 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
961 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
962 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
963 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
964 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
965 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
969 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
970 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
971 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
972 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
973 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
977 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
978 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
980 ** Changes in behavior
982 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
983 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
984 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
985 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
986 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
989 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
993 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
994 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
996 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
997 before data copying has started.
999 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1000 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1002 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1003 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1004 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1005 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1007 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1008 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1009 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1010 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1012 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1017 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1018 for its standard streams.
1020 ** Changes in behavior
1022 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1023 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1024 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1025 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1026 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1027 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1029 ** Deprecated options
1031 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1032 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1036 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1038 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1039 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1040 a btrfs file system.
1042 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1044 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1045 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1047 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1048 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1051 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1055 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1056 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1057 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1058 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1060 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1061 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1062 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1063 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1064 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1069 make check: two tests have been corrected
1073 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1074 inherited from gnulib.
1077 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1081 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1082 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1083 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1084 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1086 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1087 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1089 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1091 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1092 systems without xattr support.
1094 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1095 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1096 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1098 ** Changes in behavior
1100 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1101 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1102 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1103 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1105 ** Improved robustness
1107 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1108 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1109 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1110 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1111 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1112 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1113 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1114 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1115 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1119 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1120 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1122 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1123 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1124 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1125 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1126 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1129 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1133 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1134 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1135 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1139 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1140 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1141 data was read, or on process exit.
1142 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1144 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1145 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1146 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1147 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1149 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1150 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1151 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1152 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1154 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1155 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1157 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1158 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1160 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1161 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1162 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1164 ** Changes in behavior
1166 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1167 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1168 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1170 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1171 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1173 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1174 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1175 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1178 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1182 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1184 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1185 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1186 install: Never copies xattrs
1188 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1189 from overwriting any existing destination file
1191 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1192 mode where this feature is available.
1194 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1195 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1196 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1197 do not modify the destination at all.
1199 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1201 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1205 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1206 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1208 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1210 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1211 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1213 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1214 processing the first file name
1216 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1217 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1218 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1219 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1221 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1222 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1224 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1225 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1228 ** Changes in behavior
1230 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1231 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1233 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1234 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1235 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1237 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1238 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1240 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1242 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1243 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1244 is still marked with a '+'.
1247 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1251 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1252 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1256 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1257 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1258 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1259 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1260 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1261 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1263 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1264 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1266 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1267 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1269 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1271 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1272 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1273 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1275 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1276 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1278 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1279 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1280 used to factor large numbers.
1282 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1285 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1287 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1289 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1290 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1292 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1293 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1294 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1295 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1297 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1298 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1299 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1301 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1302 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1306 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1308 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1309 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1311 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1312 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1314 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1316 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1317 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1321 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1322 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1323 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1325 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1327 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1328 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1329 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1331 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1332 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1333 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1335 ** Changes in behavior
1337 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1338 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1341 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1345 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1346 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1347 'futimens' system calls.
1351 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1353 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1354 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1355 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1357 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1358 with no USERNAME argument.
1360 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1361 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1362 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1364 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1365 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1366 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1367 number of fields for some inputs.
1369 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1370 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1372 ** Changes in behavior
1374 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1375 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1378 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1382 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1384 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1385 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1386 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1387 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1389 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1390 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1392 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1393 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1395 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1396 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1398 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1399 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1400 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1401 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1403 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1404 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1405 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1406 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1407 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1408 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1410 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1411 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1413 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1414 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1415 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1417 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1418 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1420 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1421 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1423 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1424 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1425 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1426 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1428 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1429 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1431 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1432 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1434 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1435 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1436 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1440 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1441 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1443 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1444 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1445 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1446 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1450 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1451 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1453 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1455 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1459 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1460 which have negative errno values.
1464 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1468 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1472 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1473 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1476 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1480 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1481 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1482 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1484 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1485 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1486 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1487 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1491 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1492 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1493 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1494 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1497 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1501 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1503 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1504 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1505 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1508 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1512 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1513 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1515 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1517 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1519 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1521 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1525 ** Changes in behavior
1527 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1528 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1530 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1531 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1533 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1534 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1535 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1539 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1540 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1541 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1542 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1543 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1544 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1545 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1546 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1547 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1548 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1549 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1551 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1552 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1553 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1556 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1559 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1560 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1561 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1563 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1564 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1565 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1568 ** New build options
1570 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1571 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1572 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1573 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1575 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1576 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1577 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1578 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1579 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1580 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1581 of "make check" fail.
1583 ** Remove deprecated options
1585 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1586 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1587 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1588 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1589 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1591 ** Improved robustness
1593 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1594 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1595 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1596 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1597 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1598 loss of the contents of a/f.
1600 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1601 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1605 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1606 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1607 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1609 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1610 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1611 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1612 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1614 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1615 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1616 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1617 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1618 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1619 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1620 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1621 destination is a symlink.
1623 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1625 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1626 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1628 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1629 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1631 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1633 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1634 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1636 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1637 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1639 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1642 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1643 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1645 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1646 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1648 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1649 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1650 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1651 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1653 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1654 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1655 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1657 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1658 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1659 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1661 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1662 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1663 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1664 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1666 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1667 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1668 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1670 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1671 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1673 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1674 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1676 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1678 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1679 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1680 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1682 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1683 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1685 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1686 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1688 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1689 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1691 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1692 [present in the original version]
1695 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1699 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1701 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1702 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1703 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1705 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1706 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1708 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1712 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1713 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1715 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1716 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1718 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1719 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1721 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1722 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1723 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1724 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1725 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1726 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1728 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1729 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1732 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1733 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1735 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1738 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1739 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1740 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1742 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1743 directory is unreadable.
1745 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1746 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1747 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1749 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1750 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1751 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1752 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1753 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1756 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1757 Before it would print nothing.
1759 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1761 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1762 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1763 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1764 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1765 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1766 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1767 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1768 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1770 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1774 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1775 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1776 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1778 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1779 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1780 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1781 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1784 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1788 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1789 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1790 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1791 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1792 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1793 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1794 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1796 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1797 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1798 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1799 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1800 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1801 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1802 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1803 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1805 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1806 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1807 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1810 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1814 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1815 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1817 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1818 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1819 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1821 ** Improved robustness
1823 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1824 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1825 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1828 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1832 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1833 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1834 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1835 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1836 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1838 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1842 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1845 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1849 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1850 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1851 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1852 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1854 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1855 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1857 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1858 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1859 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1862 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1864 ** Improved robustness
1866 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1867 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1869 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1870 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1871 or NFS-mounted partition.
1873 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1874 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1878 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1879 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1880 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1881 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1882 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1883 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1885 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1886 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1888 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1889 or neglect to report file removal.
1891 For the "groups" command:
1893 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1894 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1896 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1898 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1900 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1904 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1905 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1908 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1910 ** Changes in behavior
1912 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1913 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1914 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1915 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1917 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
1918 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1919 a final './' or '../' component.
1921 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1922 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1923 this only for pipes.
1925 ** Infrastructure changes
1927 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1928 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1929 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1930 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1934 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1935 name is "." or "..".
1937 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1938 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1939 dirent.d_type support.
1941 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1942 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1944 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1945 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1946 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1947 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1950 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1952 ** Changes in behavior
1954 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1958 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1959 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1963 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1964 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1965 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1967 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1968 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1970 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1971 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1973 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1975 ** Improved robustness
1977 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1978 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1979 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1981 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1982 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1985 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1986 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1988 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1989 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1991 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1992 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1994 ** Changes in behavior
1996 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1997 where the two are distinct.
1999 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2000 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2001 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2002 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2003 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2004 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2005 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2006 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2007 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2008 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2009 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2010 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2011 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2012 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2013 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2014 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2015 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2017 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2018 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2019 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2021 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2022 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2023 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2024 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2027 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2028 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2032 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2033 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2034 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2035 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2037 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2038 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2039 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2041 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2042 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2043 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2044 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2045 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2048 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2049 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2051 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2052 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2053 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2054 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2056 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2057 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2058 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2060 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2061 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2062 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2063 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2065 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2066 and sticky) with the -m option.
2068 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2069 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2070 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2071 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2072 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2074 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2075 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2077 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2081 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2082 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2083 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2084 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2086 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2088 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2090 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2091 silently ignoring one of them.
2093 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2094 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2095 containing this change was 5.92.
2097 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2098 automatically newline terminated.
2100 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2101 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2102 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2103 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2106 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2107 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2108 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2111 ** Scheduled for removal
2113 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2114 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2116 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2117 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2118 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2119 command to unlink a directory.
2121 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2122 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2123 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2124 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2128 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2129 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2130 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2131 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2132 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2133 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2137 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2138 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2140 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2142 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2143 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2144 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2146 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2147 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2150 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2151 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2153 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2154 list directories before files.
2156 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2157 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2158 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2159 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2162 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2164 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2166 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2167 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2168 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2170 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2171 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2175 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2176 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2177 usually printing nothing.
2179 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2181 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2182 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2183 them with hard-linked directories.
2185 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2186 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2187 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2189 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2190 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2191 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2193 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2196 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2197 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2199 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2200 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2202 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2203 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2205 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2206 all command-line arguments.
2208 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2210 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2212 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2213 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2215 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2217 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2218 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2219 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2220 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2221 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2223 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2224 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2226 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2227 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2228 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2229 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2231 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2233 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2237 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2238 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2240 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2241 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2243 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2244 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2246 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2247 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2249 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2250 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2252 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2254 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2255 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2256 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2259 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2261 ** Build-related bug fixes
2263 installing .mo files would fail
2266 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2270 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2272 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2275 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2279 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2280 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2284 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2286 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2287 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2289 ** Deprecated options
2291 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2292 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2294 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2298 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2300 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2301 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2302 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2303 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2305 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2308 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2314 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2319 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2321 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2323 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2324 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2325 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2327 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2328 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2329 problematic usages. These include:
2331 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2332 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2333 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2334 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2335 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2336 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2337 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2338 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2339 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2341 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2342 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2344 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2345 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2346 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2347 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2349 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2350 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2351 between binary and text files.
2353 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2357 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2361 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2362 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2364 head tac tail tee tr
2365 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2367 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2368 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2370 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2371 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2372 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2374 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2376 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2378 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2379 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2380 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2384 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2386 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2387 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2389 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2390 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2391 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2395 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2396 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2400 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2401 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2402 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2406 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2407 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2411 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2413 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2415 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2419 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2420 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2421 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2423 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2424 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2425 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2426 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2427 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2429 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2433 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2434 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2435 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2437 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2439 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2440 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2441 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2442 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2444 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2446 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2447 rather than silently wrapping around.
2449 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2450 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2452 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2453 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2455 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2456 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2457 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2458 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2460 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2462 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2464 ** Improved robustness
2466 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2467 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2468 no matter how large the result.
2470 ** Improved portability
2472 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2473 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2475 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2477 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2478 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2479 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2481 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2482 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2486 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2487 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2489 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2491 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2492 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2493 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2494 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2496 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2497 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2499 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2500 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2501 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2503 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2505 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2506 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2508 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2509 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2511 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2513 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2514 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2516 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2517 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2519 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2520 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2521 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2523 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2525 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2527 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2531 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2533 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2534 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2535 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2537 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2538 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2540 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2541 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2542 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2544 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2545 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2547 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2548 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2549 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2550 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2552 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2553 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2555 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2556 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2557 the file system does not support it.
2559 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2561 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2562 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2564 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2566 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2567 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2569 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2570 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2571 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2572 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2574 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2575 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2578 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2579 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2580 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2581 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2583 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2584 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2585 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2586 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2588 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2589 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2591 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2593 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2594 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2595 reporting incorrect results.
2599 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2600 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2602 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2605 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2607 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2608 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2610 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2611 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2613 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2616 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2617 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2618 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2619 the file name does not look like a page range.
2621 printf has several changes:
2623 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2624 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2626 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2627 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2628 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2630 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2631 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2634 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2635 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2637 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2638 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2640 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2642 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2643 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2645 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2647 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2649 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2650 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2651 when first encountering the directory.
2655 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2656 output; POSIX requires this.
2658 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2659 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2661 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2663 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2664 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2666 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2667 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2669 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2670 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2671 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2672 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2673 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2674 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2675 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2677 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2678 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2679 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2681 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2682 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2684 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2686 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2688 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2689 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2690 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2691 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2693 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2697 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2698 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2699 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2700 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
2701 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
2703 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2704 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2705 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2707 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2708 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2710 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2711 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2713 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2714 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2715 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2716 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2717 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2719 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2720 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2722 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2723 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2725 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2727 nocreat do not create the output file
2728 excl fail if the output file already exists
2729 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2730 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2732 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2734 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2735 direct use direct I/O for data
2736 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2737 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2738 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2739 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2740 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2742 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2744 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2745 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
2748 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2749 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2750 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2751 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2752 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2753 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2755 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2756 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2758 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2761 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2763 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2765 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2766 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2768 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2769 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2770 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2772 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2773 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2774 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2776 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2778 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2779 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2781 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2782 for compatibility with bash.
2784 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2786 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2787 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2788 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2789 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2791 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2792 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2794 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2795 ls supports TABSIZE.
2796 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2797 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2798 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2800 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2803 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2805 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2806 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2807 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2808 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2809 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2810 an offset, not as a file name.
2812 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2813 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2815 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2816 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2818 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2819 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2821 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2822 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2823 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2825 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2826 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2828 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2829 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2833 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2835 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2837 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2841 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2842 or more arguments between partitions.
2844 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2845 holes in the destination.
2847 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2848 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2849 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2850 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2851 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2852 terminates immediately.
2854 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2856 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2858 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2859 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2860 not the empty string.
2862 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2863 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2867 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2868 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2869 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
2872 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2879 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2883 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2884 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
2886 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2887 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2889 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2890 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2891 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2894 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2898 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2899 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2901 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2902 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2904 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2905 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2906 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2908 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2910 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2913 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2915 ** Configuration option
2917 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2918 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2922 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2923 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2927 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2928 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2929 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2932 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2933 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2934 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2935 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2936 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2937 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2938 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2941 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2945 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2946 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2947 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2949 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2950 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2952 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2954 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2955 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2956 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2957 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2959 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2961 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2962 not just the ones that reference directories
2964 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2965 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2967 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2968 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2969 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2971 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2972 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2973 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2974 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2975 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2976 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2978 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2983 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2984 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2986 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2988 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2990 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2992 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2993 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2995 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2996 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2998 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3000 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3004 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3006 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3008 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3009 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3010 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3011 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3012 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3014 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3015 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3017 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3018 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3020 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3021 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3023 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3024 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3025 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3029 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3030 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3031 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3032 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3033 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3034 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3035 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3036 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3037 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3038 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3039 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3040 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3041 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3042 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3044 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3046 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3047 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3049 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3051 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3053 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3054 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3056 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3058 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3059 without a trailing newline.
3061 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3062 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3064 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3067 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3071 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3073 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3075 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3076 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3077 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3078 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3080 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3082 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3083 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3084 be printed without leading spaces.
3086 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3087 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3092 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3093 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3094 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3096 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3098 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3099 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3101 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3102 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3104 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3105 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3107 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3109 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3111 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3113 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3114 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3116 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3118 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3120 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3121 byte offsets are specified.
3124 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3127 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3130 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3131 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3132 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3133 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3134 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3135 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3136 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3137 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3138 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3139 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3140 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3141 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3142 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3143 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3144 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3145 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3146 directory where M has write access.
3147 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3148 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3149 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3152 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3153 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3154 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3155 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3156 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3157 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3158 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3159 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3160 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3161 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3162 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3163 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3164 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3165 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3166 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3167 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3168 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3169 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3170 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3171 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3172 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3173 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3174 appeared one additional time.
3176 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3177 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3178 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3179 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3182 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3183 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3184 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3185 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3186 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3187 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3188 if there were more than 338.
3190 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3191 - false --help now exits nonzero
3194 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3195 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3196 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3197 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3200 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3201 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3202 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3203 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3204 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3207 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3208 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3209 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3210 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3211 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3212 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3213 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3216 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3217 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3218 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3219 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3220 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3221 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3223 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3224 under certain unusual conditions
3225 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3226 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3229 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3230 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3231 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3232 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3233 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3234 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3235 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3236 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3237 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3238 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3239 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3240 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3241 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3242 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3243 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3244 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3247 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3248 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3251 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3252 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3253 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3254 involving hard-linked directories
3255 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3256 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3257 character-special and block files
3260 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3261 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3262 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3263 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3264 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3265 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3266 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3267 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3268 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3270 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3271 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3272 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3273 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3274 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3275 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3276 specified on the command line.
3277 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3278 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3279 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3280 the first file untouched.
3281 * readlink: new program
3282 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3283 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3284 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3285 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3286 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3287 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3290 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3291 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3292 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3293 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3294 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3295 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3296 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3297 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3298 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3299 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3300 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3301 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3303 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3304 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3305 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3307 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3308 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3309 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3310 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3311 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3312 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3313 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3314 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3317 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3318 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3321 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3322 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3323 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3324 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3325 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3326 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3327 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3330 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3331 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3333 ========================================================================
3334 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3335 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3338 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3340 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3341 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3342 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3343 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3344 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3345 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3346 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3347 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3348 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3349 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3350 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3351 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3353 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3354 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3355 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3356 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3358 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3361 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3363 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3364 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3365 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3366 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3367 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3368 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3369 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3372 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3373 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3374 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3375 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3376 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3377 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3378 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3379 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3380 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3381 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3382 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3383 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3384 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3385 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3386 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3387 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3389 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3390 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3392 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3393 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3394 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3395 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3396 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3397 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3399 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3400 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3401 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3402 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3403 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3404 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3405 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3407 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3408 the source files in the following example:
3409 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3410 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3411 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3412 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3413 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3414 links between source files with --preserve=links
3415 * cp accepts new options:
3416 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3417 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3418 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3419 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3420 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3421 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3422 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3423 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3424 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3426 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3427 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3428 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3429 even though it's older than dest.
3430 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3431 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3432 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3433 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3434 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3436 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3437 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3438 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3439 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3440 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3441 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3442 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3444 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3445 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3446 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3448 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3449 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3450 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3451 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3452 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3453 This is the default.
3455 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3456 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3457 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3458 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3459 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3461 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3464 ========================================================================
3465 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3466 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3469 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3470 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3472 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3473 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3474 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3475 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3476 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3478 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3479 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3480 that specifies a non-directory
3483 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3484 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3485 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3486 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3487 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3488 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3489 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3490 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3491 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3492 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3493 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3494 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3495 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3496 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3497 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3498 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3499 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3500 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3501 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3502 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3503 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3504 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3505 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3506 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3508 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3509 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3510 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3512 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3514 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3515 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3517 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3518 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3519 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3520 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3521 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3523 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3524 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3525 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3526 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3527 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3529 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3531 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3532 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3533 * still more portability fixes
3534 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3535 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3537 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3539 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3541 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3543 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3544 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3545 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3546 there is any time remaining
3547 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3549 ========================================================================
3550 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3551 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3553 This package began as the union of the following:
3554 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3556 ========================================================================
3558 Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3560 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3561 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3562 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3563 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3564 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3565 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.