1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
8 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
9 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
11 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
12 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
13 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
17 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
18 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
20 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
21 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
22 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
24 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
25 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
26 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
28 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
29 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
30 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
32 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
33 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
34 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
36 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
37 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
38 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
40 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
41 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
43 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
44 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
46 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
47 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
48 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
50 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
51 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
52 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
54 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
55 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
56 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
58 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
59 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
60 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
61 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
63 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
64 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
65 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
67 ** Changes in behavior
69 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
70 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
71 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
72 'total' in the target column.
74 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
75 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
76 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
78 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
79 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
83 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
84 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
86 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
87 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
92 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
93 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
94 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
95 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
96 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
97 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
98 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
99 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
100 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
101 for a patched distribution package.
103 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
104 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
106 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
107 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
108 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
109 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
112 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
116 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
118 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
119 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
120 sha384sum and sha512sum.
124 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
125 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
126 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
127 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
128 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
130 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
131 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
133 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
134 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
135 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
136 eventually exits nonzero.
138 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
139 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
140 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
141 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
142 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
144 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
145 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
146 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
148 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
149 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
150 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
152 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
153 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
154 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
156 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
157 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
158 Before, this would infloop:
159 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
160 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
162 ** Changes in behavior
164 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
168 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
169 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
170 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
171 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
172 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
175 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
176 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
177 format-changing options.
179 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
180 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
181 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
182 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
183 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
187 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
188 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
189 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
190 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
191 are run without following the instructions in README.
193 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
194 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
195 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
196 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
197 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
198 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
199 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
202 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
206 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
207 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
208 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
209 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
211 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
212 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
213 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
214 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
216 sort -u could read freed memory.
217 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
218 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
219 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
223 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
224 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
225 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
226 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
229 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
233 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
234 processes will not intersperse their output.
235 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
237 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
238 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
239 date: invalid date '\260'
240 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
242 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
243 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
244 lines output by df, can work reliably.
245 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
247 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
248 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
249 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
251 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
252 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
253 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
254 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
255 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
256 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
258 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
259 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
261 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
262 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
264 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
265 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
266 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
268 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
269 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
270 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
274 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
276 ** Changes in behavior
278 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
279 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
280 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
281 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
282 have any reason to include it here.
286 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
287 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
288 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
290 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
291 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
292 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
295 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
299 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
300 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
301 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
302 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
303 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
304 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
306 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
307 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
308 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
309 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
310 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
311 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
312 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
314 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
315 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
317 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
318 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
322 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
323 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
325 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
327 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
329 ** Changes in behavior
331 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
332 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
333 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
335 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
336 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
339 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
343 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
344 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
345 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
346 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
347 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
348 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
349 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
350 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
352 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
353 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
354 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
355 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
356 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
358 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
359 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
361 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
362 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
364 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
365 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
367 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
368 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
370 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
371 additional static suffix to output file names.
373 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
374 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
375 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
377 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
378 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
382 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
383 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
384 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
386 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
387 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
388 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
389 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
390 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
391 typically still point to one of the hard links.
393 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
394 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
395 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
396 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
397 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
399 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
400 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
401 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
402 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
406 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
407 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
408 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
410 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
411 instead of causing a usage failure.
413 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
416 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
420 realpath: print resolved file names.
424 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
425 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
427 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
428 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
430 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
431 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
432 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
433 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
434 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
435 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
437 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
438 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
439 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
441 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
442 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
443 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
445 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
446 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
447 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
448 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
449 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
451 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
453 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
454 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
456 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
457 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
458 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
460 ** Changes in behavior
462 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
463 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
464 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
465 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
466 usually-short referent instead.
468 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
469 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
470 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
471 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
474 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
478 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
479 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
480 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
482 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
483 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
485 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
486 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
490 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
491 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
493 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
494 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
495 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
496 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
498 ** Changes in behavior
500 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
501 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
502 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
506 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
507 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
508 only .tar.xz files is enough.
511 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
515 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
516 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
517 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
519 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
520 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
522 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
523 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
524 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
525 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
526 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
528 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
529 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
530 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
531 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
532 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
533 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
534 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
535 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
537 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
538 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
540 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
541 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
543 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
544 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
546 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
547 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
548 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
550 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
551 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
552 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
553 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
555 ** Changes in behavior
557 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
558 when -v or -c specified.
560 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
561 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
565 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
566 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
567 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
568 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
569 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
571 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
572 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
573 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
575 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
576 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
577 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
578 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
579 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
580 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
581 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
583 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
584 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
585 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
589 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
590 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
592 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
595 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
596 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
598 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
599 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
601 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
602 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
604 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
606 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
610 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
611 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
613 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
616 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
620 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
621 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
623 ** Changes in behavior
625 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
626 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
627 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
628 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
629 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
630 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
632 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
633 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
634 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
638 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
641 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
645 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
646 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
647 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
649 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
650 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
651 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
653 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
654 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
655 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
657 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
658 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
660 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
661 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
663 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
664 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
666 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
667 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
671 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
672 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
673 processed portion thereof.
675 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
676 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
678 ** Changes in behavior
680 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
681 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
682 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
684 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
685 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
686 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
688 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
689 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
691 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
692 Use --preserve-context instead.
694 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
697 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
701 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
702 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
703 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
704 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
705 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
707 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
708 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
710 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
711 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
712 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
714 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
715 reject file names invalid for that file system.
717 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
718 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
722 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
723 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
724 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
725 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
726 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
727 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
728 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
729 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
731 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
732 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
733 the same number of fields are output for each line.
735 ** Changes in behavior
737 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
738 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
739 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
742 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
746 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
747 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
748 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
751 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
755 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
756 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
758 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
759 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
761 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
762 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
764 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
765 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
766 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
767 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
769 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
770 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
772 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
773 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
774 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
776 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
778 ** Changes in behavior
780 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
781 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
782 to the number of available processors.
786 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
789 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
793 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
794 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
795 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
796 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
798 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
799 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
800 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
802 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
803 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
805 ** Changes in behavior
807 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
808 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
810 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
811 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
812 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
813 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
814 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
815 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
817 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
818 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
819 the same way as the others.
822 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
826 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
827 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
828 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
830 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
831 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
833 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
834 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
835 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
837 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
838 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
840 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
841 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
843 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
844 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
845 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
847 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
848 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
849 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
850 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
854 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
855 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
857 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
860 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
861 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
863 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
865 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
866 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
867 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
869 ** Changes in behavior
871 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
872 rather than its aliased target.
874 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
875 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
876 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
878 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
879 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
880 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
881 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
882 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
883 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
884 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
885 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
887 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
889 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
891 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
892 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
895 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
896 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
897 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
898 control like taskset for example.
900 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
902 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
903 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
904 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
905 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
906 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
907 includes %C when context information is available.
909 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
910 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
911 rather than a file system attribute.
913 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
914 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
915 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
916 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
918 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
919 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
920 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
922 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
923 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
924 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
927 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
931 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
932 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
934 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
936 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
937 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
939 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
940 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
941 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
942 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
944 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
945 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
946 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
950 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
951 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
953 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
954 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
955 duration after the initial signal was sent.
957 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
958 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
959 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
960 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
961 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
962 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
963 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
964 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
965 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
967 ** Changes in behavior
969 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
970 sequence when it would be a no-op.
972 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
973 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
976 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
980 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
981 of available processors, which may not have been the case
982 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
983 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
987 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
988 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
990 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
991 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
992 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
993 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
995 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
996 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
997 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1000 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1004 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1005 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1006 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1008 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1009 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1010 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1012 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1013 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1015 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1016 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1017 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1018 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1020 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1021 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1022 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1024 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1025 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1026 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1027 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1029 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1030 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1031 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1033 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1034 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1035 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1036 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1038 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1039 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1040 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1042 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1043 processes will not intersperse their output.
1044 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1047 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1051 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1052 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1054 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1055 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1057 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1058 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1059 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1060 the presence of the empty string argument.
1061 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1063 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1064 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1065 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1066 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1068 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1069 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1071 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1072 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1073 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1075 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1076 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1077 and with a malicious user on the same system
1078 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1079 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1082 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1086 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1087 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1088 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1090 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1091 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1092 offending directory and all "contents."
1094 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1095 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1096 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1098 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1099 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1100 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1102 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1103 processes will not intersperse their output.
1104 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1105 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1107 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1108 output the name of the file to stdout.
1109 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1111 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1112 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1113 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1115 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1116 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1119 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1120 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1121 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1123 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1124 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1125 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1126 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1127 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1128 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1130 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1131 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1132 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1133 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1135 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1136 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1138 ** Changes in behavior
1140 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1141 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1142 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1143 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1144 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1146 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1147 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1148 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1149 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1151 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1153 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1154 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1155 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1156 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1157 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1161 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1165 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1166 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1168 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1169 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1171 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1172 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1173 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1175 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1176 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1179 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1183 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1184 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1185 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1187 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1188 to accommodate leap seconds.
1189 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1191 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1192 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1193 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1195 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1197 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1198 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1199 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1201 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1202 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1203 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1204 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1205 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1209 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1210 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1211 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1212 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1214 ** Changes in behavior
1216 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1217 environment variable is set.
1219 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1220 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1221 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1225 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1226 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1227 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1228 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1230 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1231 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1232 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1233 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1237 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1238 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1239 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1241 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1242 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1243 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1244 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1245 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1246 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1247 another improvement:
1249 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1250 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1253 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1257 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1258 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1259 and libraries tested at configure time.
1260 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1262 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1263 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1265 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1266 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1268 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1269 printing a summary to stderr.
1270 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1272 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1273 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1274 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1276 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1277 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1279 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1280 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1281 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1282 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1284 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1285 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1286 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1287 which is relatively unusual.
1288 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1290 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1291 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1292 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1293 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1294 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1295 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1296 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1300 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1301 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1302 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1303 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1304 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1308 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1309 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1311 ** Changes in behavior
1313 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1314 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1315 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1316 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1317 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1320 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1324 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1325 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1327 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1328 before data copying has started.
1330 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1331 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1333 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1334 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1335 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1336 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1338 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1339 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1340 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1341 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1343 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1348 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1349 for its standard streams.
1351 ** Changes in behavior
1353 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1354 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1355 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1356 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1357 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1358 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1360 ** Deprecated options
1362 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1363 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1367 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1369 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1370 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1371 a btrfs file system.
1373 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1375 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1376 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1378 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1379 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1382 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1386 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1387 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1388 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1389 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1391 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1392 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1393 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1394 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1395 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1400 make check: two tests have been corrected
1404 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1405 inherited from gnulib.
1408 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1412 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1413 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1414 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1415 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1417 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1418 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1420 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1422 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1423 systems without xattr support.
1425 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1426 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1427 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1429 ** Changes in behavior
1431 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1432 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1433 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1434 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1436 ** Improved robustness
1438 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1439 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1440 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1441 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1442 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1443 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1444 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1445 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1446 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1450 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1451 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1453 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1454 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1455 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1456 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1457 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1460 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1464 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1465 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1466 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1470 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1471 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1472 data was read, or on process exit.
1473 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1475 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1476 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1477 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1478 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1480 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1481 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1482 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1483 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1485 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1486 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1488 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1489 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1491 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1492 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1493 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1495 ** Changes in behavior
1497 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1498 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1499 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1501 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1502 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1504 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1505 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1506 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1509 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1513 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1515 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1516 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1517 install: Never copies xattrs
1519 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1520 from overwriting any existing destination file
1522 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1523 mode where this feature is available.
1525 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1526 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1527 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1528 do not modify the destination at all.
1530 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1532 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1536 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1537 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1539 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1541 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1542 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1544 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1545 processing the first file name
1547 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1548 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1549 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1550 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1552 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1553 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1555 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1556 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1559 ** Changes in behavior
1561 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1562 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1564 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1565 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1566 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1568 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1569 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1571 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1573 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1574 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1575 is still marked with a '+'.
1578 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1582 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1583 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1587 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1588 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1589 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1590 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1591 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1592 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1594 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1595 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1597 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1598 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1600 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1602 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1603 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1604 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1606 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1607 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1609 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1610 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1611 used to factor large numbers.
1613 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1616 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1618 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1620 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1621 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1623 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1624 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1625 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1626 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1628 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1629 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1630 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1632 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1633 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1637 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1639 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1640 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1642 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1643 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1645 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1647 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1648 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1652 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1653 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1654 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1656 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1658 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1659 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1660 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1662 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1663 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1664 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1666 ** Changes in behavior
1668 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1669 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1672 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1676 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1677 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1678 'futimens' system calls.
1682 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1684 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1685 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1686 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1688 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1689 with no USERNAME argument.
1691 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1692 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1693 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1695 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1696 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1697 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1698 number of fields for some inputs.
1700 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1701 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1703 ** Changes in behavior
1705 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1706 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1709 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1713 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1715 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1716 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1717 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1718 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1720 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1721 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1723 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1724 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1726 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1727 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1729 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1730 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1731 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1732 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1734 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1735 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1736 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1737 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1738 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1739 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1741 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1742 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1744 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1745 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1746 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1748 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1749 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1751 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1752 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1754 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1755 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1756 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1757 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1759 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1760 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1762 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1763 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1765 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1766 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1767 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1771 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1772 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1774 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1775 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1776 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1777 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1781 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1782 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1784 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1786 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1790 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1791 which have negative errno values.
1795 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1799 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1803 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1804 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1807 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1811 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1812 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1813 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1815 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1816 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1817 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1818 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1822 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1823 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1824 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1825 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1828 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1832 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1834 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1835 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1836 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1839 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1843 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1844 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1846 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1848 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1850 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1852 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1856 ** Changes in behavior
1858 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1859 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1861 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1862 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1864 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1865 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1866 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1870 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1871 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1872 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1873 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1874 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1875 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1876 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1877 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1878 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1879 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1880 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1882 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1883 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1884 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1887 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1890 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1891 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1892 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1894 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1895 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1896 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1899 ** New build options
1901 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1902 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1903 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1904 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1906 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1907 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1908 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1909 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1910 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1911 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1912 of "make check" fail.
1914 ** Remove deprecated options
1916 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1917 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1918 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1919 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1920 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1922 ** Improved robustness
1924 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1925 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1926 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1927 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1928 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1929 loss of the contents of a/f.
1931 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1932 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1936 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1937 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1938 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1940 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1941 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1942 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1943 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1945 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1946 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1947 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1948 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1949 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1950 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1951 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1952 destination is a symlink.
1954 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1956 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1957 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1959 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1960 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1962 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1964 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1965 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1967 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1968 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1970 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1973 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1974 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1976 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1977 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1979 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1980 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1981 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1982 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1984 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1985 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1986 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1988 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1989 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1990 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1992 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1993 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1994 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1995 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1997 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1998 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1999 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2001 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2002 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2004 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2005 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2007 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2009 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2010 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2011 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2013 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2014 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2016 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2017 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2019 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2020 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2022 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2023 [present in the original version]
2026 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2030 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2032 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2033 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2034 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2036 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2037 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2039 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2043 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2044 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2046 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2047 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2049 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2050 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2052 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2053 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2054 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2055 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2056 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2057 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2059 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2060 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2063 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2064 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2066 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2069 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2070 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2071 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2073 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2074 directory is unreadable.
2076 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2077 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2078 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2080 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2081 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2082 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2083 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2084 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2087 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2088 Before it would print nothing.
2090 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2092 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2093 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2094 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2095 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2096 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2097 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2098 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2099 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2101 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2105 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2106 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2107 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2109 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2110 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2111 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2112 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2115 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2119 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2120 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2121 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2122 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2123 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2124 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2125 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2127 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2128 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2129 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2130 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2131 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2132 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2133 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2134 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2136 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2137 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2138 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2141 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2145 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2146 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2148 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2149 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2150 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2152 ** Improved robustness
2154 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2155 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2156 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2159 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2163 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2164 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2165 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2166 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2167 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2169 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2173 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2176 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2180 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2181 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2182 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2183 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2185 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2186 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2188 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2189 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2190 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2193 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2195 ** Improved robustness
2197 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2198 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2200 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2201 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2202 or NFS-mounted partition.
2204 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2205 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2209 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2210 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2211 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2212 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2213 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2214 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2216 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2217 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2219 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2220 or neglect to report file removal.
2222 For the "groups" command:
2224 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2225 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2227 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2229 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2231 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2235 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2236 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2239 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2241 ** Changes in behavior
2243 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2244 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2245 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2246 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2248 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2249 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2250 a final './' or '../' component.
2252 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2253 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2254 this only for pipes.
2256 ** Infrastructure changes
2258 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2259 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2260 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2261 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2265 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2266 name is "." or "..".
2268 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2269 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2270 dirent.d_type support.
2272 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2273 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2275 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2276 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2277 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2278 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2281 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2283 ** Changes in behavior
2285 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2289 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2290 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2294 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2295 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2296 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2298 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2299 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2301 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2302 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2304 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2306 ** Improved robustness
2308 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2309 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2310 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2312 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2313 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2316 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2317 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2319 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2320 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2322 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2323 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2325 ** Changes in behavior
2327 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2328 where the two are distinct.
2330 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2331 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2332 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2333 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2334 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2335 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2336 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2337 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2338 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2339 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2340 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2341 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2342 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2343 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2344 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2345 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2346 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2348 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2349 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2350 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2352 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2353 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2354 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2355 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2358 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2359 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2363 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2364 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2365 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2366 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2368 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2369 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2370 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2372 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2373 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2374 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2375 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2376 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2379 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2380 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2382 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2383 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2384 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2385 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2387 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2388 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2389 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2391 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2392 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2393 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2394 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2396 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2397 and sticky) with the -m option.
2399 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2400 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2401 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2402 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2403 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2405 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2406 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2408 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2412 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2413 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2414 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2415 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2417 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2419 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2421 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2422 silently ignoring one of them.
2424 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2425 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2426 containing this change was 5.92.
2428 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2429 automatically newline terminated.
2431 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2432 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2433 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2434 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2437 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2438 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2439 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2442 ** Scheduled for removal
2444 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2445 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2447 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2448 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2449 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2450 command to unlink a directory.
2452 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2453 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2454 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2455 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2459 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2460 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2461 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2462 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2463 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2464 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2468 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2469 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2471 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2473 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2474 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2475 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2477 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2478 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2481 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2482 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2484 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2485 list directories before files.
2487 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2488 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2489 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2490 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2493 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2495 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2497 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2498 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2499 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2501 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2502 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2506 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2507 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2508 usually printing nothing.
2510 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2512 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2513 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2514 them with hard-linked directories.
2516 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2517 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2518 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2520 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2521 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2522 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2524 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2527 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2528 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2530 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2531 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2533 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2534 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2536 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2537 all command-line arguments.
2539 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2541 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2543 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2544 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2546 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2548 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2549 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2550 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2551 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2552 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2554 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2555 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2557 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2558 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2559 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2560 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2562 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2564 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2568 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2569 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2571 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2572 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2574 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2575 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2577 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2578 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2580 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2581 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2583 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2585 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2586 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2587 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2590 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2592 ** Build-related bug fixes
2594 installing .mo files would fail
2597 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2601 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2603 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2606 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2610 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2611 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2615 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2617 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2618 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2620 ** Deprecated options
2622 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2623 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2625 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2629 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2631 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2632 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2633 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2634 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2636 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2639 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2645 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2650 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2652 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2654 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2655 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2656 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2658 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2659 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2660 problematic usages. These include:
2662 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2663 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2664 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2665 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2666 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2667 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2668 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2669 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2670 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2672 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2673 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2675 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2676 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2677 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2678 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2680 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2681 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2682 between binary and text files.
2684 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2688 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2692 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2693 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2695 head tac tail tee tr
2696 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2698 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2699 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2701 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2702 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2703 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2705 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2707 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2709 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2710 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2711 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2715 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2717 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2718 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2720 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2721 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2722 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2726 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2727 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2731 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2732 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2733 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2737 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2738 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2742 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2744 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2746 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2750 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2751 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2752 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2754 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2755 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2756 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2757 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2758 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2760 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2764 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2765 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2766 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2768 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2770 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2771 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2772 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2773 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2775 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2777 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2778 rather than silently wrapping around.
2780 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2781 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2783 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2784 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2786 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2787 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2788 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2789 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2791 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2793 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2795 ** Improved robustness
2797 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2798 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2799 no matter how large the result.
2801 ** Improved portability
2803 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2804 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2806 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2808 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2809 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2810 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2812 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2813 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2817 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2818 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2820 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2822 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2823 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2824 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2825 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2827 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2828 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2830 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2831 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2832 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2834 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2836 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2837 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2839 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2840 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2842 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2844 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2845 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2847 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2848 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2850 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2851 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2852 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2854 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2856 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2858 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2862 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2864 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2865 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2866 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2868 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2869 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2871 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2872 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2873 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2875 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2876 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2878 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2879 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2880 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2881 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2883 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2884 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2886 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2887 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2888 the file system does not support it.
2890 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2892 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2893 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2895 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2897 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2898 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2900 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2901 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2902 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2903 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2905 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2906 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2909 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2910 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2911 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2912 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2914 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2915 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2916 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2917 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2919 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2920 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2922 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2924 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2925 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2926 reporting incorrect results.
2930 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2931 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2933 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2936 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2938 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2939 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2941 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2942 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2944 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2947 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2948 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2949 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2950 the file name does not look like a page range.
2952 printf has several changes:
2954 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2955 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2957 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2958 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2959 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2961 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2962 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2965 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2966 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2968 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2969 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2971 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2973 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2974 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2976 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2978 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2980 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2981 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2982 when first encountering the directory.
2986 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2987 output; POSIX requires this.
2989 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2990 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2992 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2994 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2995 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2997 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2998 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3000 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3001 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3002 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3003 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3004 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3005 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3006 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3008 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3009 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3010 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3012 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3013 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3015 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3017 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3019 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3020 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3021 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3022 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3024 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3028 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3029 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3030 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3031 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3032 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3034 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3035 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3036 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3038 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3039 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3041 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3042 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3044 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3045 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3046 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3047 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3048 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3050 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3051 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3053 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3054 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3056 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3058 nocreat do not create the output file
3059 excl fail if the output file already exists
3060 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3061 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3063 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3065 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3066 direct use direct I/O for data
3067 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3068 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3069 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3070 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3071 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3073 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3075 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3076 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3079 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3080 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3081 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3082 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3083 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3084 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3086 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3087 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3089 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3092 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3094 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3096 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3097 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3099 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3100 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3101 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3103 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3104 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3105 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3107 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3109 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3110 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3112 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3113 for compatibility with bash.
3115 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3117 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3118 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3119 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3120 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3122 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3123 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3125 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3126 ls supports TABSIZE.
3127 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3128 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3129 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3131 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3134 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3136 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3137 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3138 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3139 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3140 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3141 an offset, not as a file name.
3143 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3144 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3146 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3147 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3149 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3150 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3152 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3153 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3154 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3156 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3157 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3159 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3160 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3164 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3166 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3168 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3172 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3173 or more arguments between partitions.
3175 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3176 holes in the destination.
3178 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3179 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3180 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3181 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3182 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3183 terminates immediately.
3185 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3187 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3189 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3190 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3191 not the empty string.
3193 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3194 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3198 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3199 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3200 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3203 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3210 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3214 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3215 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3217 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3218 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3220 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3221 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3222 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3225 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3229 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3230 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3232 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3233 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3235 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3236 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3237 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3239 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3241 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3244 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3246 ** Configuration option
3248 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3249 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3253 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3254 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3258 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3259 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3260 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3263 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3264 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3265 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3266 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3267 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3268 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3269 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3272 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3276 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3277 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3278 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3280 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3281 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3283 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3285 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3286 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3287 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3288 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3290 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3292 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3293 not just the ones that reference directories
3295 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3296 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3298 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3299 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3300 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3302 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3303 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3304 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3305 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3306 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3307 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3309 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3314 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3315 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3317 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3319 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3321 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3323 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3324 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3326 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3327 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3329 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3331 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3335 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3337 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3339 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3340 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3341 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3342 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3343 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3345 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3346 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3348 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3349 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3351 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3352 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3354 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3355 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3356 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3360 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3361 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3362 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3363 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3364 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3365 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3366 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3367 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3368 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3369 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3370 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3371 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3372 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3373 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3375 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3377 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3378 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3380 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3382 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3384 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3385 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3387 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3389 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3390 without a trailing newline.
3392 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3393 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3395 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3398 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3402 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3404 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3406 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3407 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3408 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3409 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3411 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3413 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3414 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3415 be printed without leading spaces.
3417 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3418 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3423 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3424 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3425 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3427 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3429 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3430 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3432 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3433 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3435 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3436 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3438 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3440 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3442 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3444 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3445 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3447 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3449 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3451 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3452 byte offsets are specified.
3455 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3458 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3461 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3462 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3463 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3464 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3465 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3466 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3467 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3468 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3469 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3470 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3471 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3472 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3473 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3474 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3475 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3476 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3477 directory where M has write access.
3478 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3479 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3480 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3483 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3484 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3485 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3486 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3487 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3488 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3489 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3490 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3491 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3492 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3493 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3494 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3495 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3496 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3497 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3498 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3499 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3500 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3501 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3502 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3503 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3504 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3505 appeared one additional time.
3507 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3508 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3509 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3510 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3513 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3514 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3515 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3516 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3517 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3518 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3519 if there were more than 338.
3521 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3522 - false --help now exits nonzero
3525 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3526 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3527 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3528 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3531 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3532 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3533 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3534 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3535 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3538 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3539 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3540 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3541 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3542 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3543 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3544 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3547 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3548 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3549 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3550 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3551 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3552 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3554 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3555 under certain unusual conditions
3556 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3557 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3560 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3561 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3562 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3563 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3564 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3565 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3566 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3567 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3568 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3569 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3570 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3571 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3572 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3573 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3574 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3575 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3578 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3579 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3582 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3583 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3584 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3585 involving hard-linked directories
3586 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3587 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3588 character-special and block files
3591 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3592 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3593 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3594 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3595 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3596 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3597 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3598 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3599 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3601 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3602 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3603 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3604 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3605 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3606 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3607 specified on the command line.
3608 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3609 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3610 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3611 the first file untouched.
3612 * readlink: new program
3613 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3614 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3615 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3616 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3617 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3618 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3621 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3622 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3623 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3624 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3625 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3626 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3627 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3628 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3629 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3630 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3631 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3632 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3634 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3635 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3636 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3638 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3639 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3640 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3641 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3642 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3643 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3644 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3645 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3648 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3649 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3652 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3653 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3654 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3655 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3656 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3657 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3658 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3661 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3662 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3664 ========================================================================
3665 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3666 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3669 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3671 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3672 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3673 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3674 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3675 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3676 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3677 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3678 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3679 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3680 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3681 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3682 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3684 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3685 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3686 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3687 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3689 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3692 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3694 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3695 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3696 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3697 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3698 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3699 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3700 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3703 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3704 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3705 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3706 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3707 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3708 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3709 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3710 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3711 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3712 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3713 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3714 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3715 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3716 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3717 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3718 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3720 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3721 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3723 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3724 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3725 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3726 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3727 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3728 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3730 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3731 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3732 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3733 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3734 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3735 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3736 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3738 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3739 the source files in the following example:
3740 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3741 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3742 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3743 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3744 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3745 links between source files with --preserve=links
3746 * cp accepts new options:
3747 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3748 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3749 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3750 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3751 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3752 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3753 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3754 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3755 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3757 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3758 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3759 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3760 even though it's older than dest.
3761 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3762 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3763 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3764 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3765 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3767 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3768 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3769 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3770 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3771 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3772 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3773 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3775 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3776 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3777 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3779 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3780 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3781 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3782 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3783 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3784 This is the default.
3786 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3787 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3788 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3789 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3790 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3792 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3795 ========================================================================
3796 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3797 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3800 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3801 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3803 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3804 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3805 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3806 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3807 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3809 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3810 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3811 that specifies a non-directory
3814 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3815 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3816 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3817 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3818 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3819 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3820 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3821 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3822 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3823 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3824 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3825 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3826 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3827 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3828 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3829 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3830 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3831 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3832 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3833 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3834 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3835 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3836 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3837 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3839 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3840 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3841 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3843 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3845 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3846 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3848 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3849 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3850 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3851 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3852 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3854 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3855 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3856 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3857 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3858 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3860 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3862 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3863 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3864 * still more portability fixes
3865 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3866 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3868 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3870 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3872 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3874 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3875 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3876 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3877 there is any time remaining
3878 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3880 ========================================================================
3881 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3882 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3884 This package began as the union of the following:
3885 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3887 ========================================================================
3889 Copyright (C) 2001-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3891 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3892 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3893 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3894 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3895 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3896 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.