1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
8 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
9 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
11 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
12 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
14 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
15 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
17 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
18 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
19 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
21 ** Changes in behavior
23 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
24 when -v or -c specified.
28 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
29 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
30 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
31 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
32 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
33 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
34 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
36 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
37 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
38 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
40 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
41 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
42 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
46 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
47 For example `shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2` no longer exhausts memory.
49 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
52 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
56 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
57 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
60 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
64 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
65 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
67 ** Changes in behavior
69 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
70 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
71 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
72 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
73 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
74 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
76 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
77 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
78 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
82 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
85 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
89 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
90 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
91 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
93 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
94 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
95 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
97 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
98 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
99 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
101 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
102 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
104 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
105 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
107 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
108 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
110 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
111 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
115 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
116 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
117 processed portion thereof.
119 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
120 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
122 ** Changes in behavior
124 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
125 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
126 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
128 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
129 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
130 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
132 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
133 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
135 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
136 Use --preserve-context instead.
138 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
141 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
145 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
146 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
147 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
148 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
149 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
151 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
152 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
154 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
155 reject file names invalid for that file system.
157 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
158 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
162 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
163 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
164 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
165 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
166 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
167 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
168 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
169 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
171 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
172 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
173 the same number of fields are output for each line.
175 ** Changes in behavior
177 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
178 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
179 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
182 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
186 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
187 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
188 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
191 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
195 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
196 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
198 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
199 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
201 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
202 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
204 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
205 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
206 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
207 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
209 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
210 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
212 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
213 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
214 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
216 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
218 ** Changes in behavior
220 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
221 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
222 to the number of available processors.
226 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
229 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
233 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
234 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
235 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
236 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
238 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
239 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
240 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
242 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
243 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
245 ** Changes in behavior
247 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
248 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
250 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
251 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
252 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
253 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
254 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
255 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
257 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
258 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
259 the same way as the others.
262 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
266 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
267 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
268 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
270 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
271 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
273 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
274 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
275 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
277 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
278 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
280 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
281 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
283 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
284 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
285 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
287 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
288 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
289 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
290 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
294 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
295 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
297 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
300 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
301 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
303 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
305 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
306 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
307 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
309 ** Changes in behavior
311 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
312 rather than its aliased target.
314 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
315 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
316 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
318 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
319 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
320 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
321 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
322 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
323 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
324 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
325 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
327 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
329 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
331 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
332 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
335 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
336 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
337 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
338 control like taskset for example.
340 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
342 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
343 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
344 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
345 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
346 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
347 includes %C when context information is available.
349 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
350 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
351 rather than a file system attribute.
353 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
354 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
355 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
356 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
358 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
359 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
360 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
362 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
363 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
364 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
367 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
371 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
372 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
374 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
376 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
377 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
379 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
380 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
381 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
382 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
384 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
385 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
386 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
390 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
391 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
393 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
394 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
395 duration after the initial signal was sent.
397 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
398 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
399 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
400 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
401 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
402 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
403 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
404 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
405 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
407 ** Changes in behavior
409 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
410 sequence when it would be a no-op.
412 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
413 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
416 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
420 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
421 of available processors, which may not have been the case
422 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
423 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
427 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
428 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
430 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
431 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
432 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
433 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
435 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
436 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
437 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
440 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
444 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
445 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
446 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
448 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
449 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
450 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
452 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
453 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
455 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
456 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
457 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
458 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
460 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
461 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
462 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
464 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
465 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
466 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
467 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
469 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
470 renamed-aside and then recreated.
471 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
473 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
474 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
475 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
476 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
478 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
479 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
480 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
482 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
483 processes will not intersperse their output.
484 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
487 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
491 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
492 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
494 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
495 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
497 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
498 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
499 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
500 the presence of the empty string argument.
501 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
503 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
504 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
505 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
506 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
508 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
509 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
511 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
512 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
513 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
515 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
516 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
517 and with a malicious user on the same system
518 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
519 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
522 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
526 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
527 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
528 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
530 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
531 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
532 offending directory and all "contents."
534 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
535 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
536 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
538 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
539 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
540 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
542 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
543 processes will not intersperse their output.
544 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
545 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
547 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
548 output the name of the file to stdout.
549 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
551 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
552 call fails with errno == EACCES.
553 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
555 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
556 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
559 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
560 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
561 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
563 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
564 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
565 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
566 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
567 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
568 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
570 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
571 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
572 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
573 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
575 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
576 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
578 ** Changes in behavior
580 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
581 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
582 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
583 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
584 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
586 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
587 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
588 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
589 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
591 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
593 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
594 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
595 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
596 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
597 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
601 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
605 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
606 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
608 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
609 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
611 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
612 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
613 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
615 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
616 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
619 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
623 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
624 when the source file doesn't have write access.
625 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
627 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
628 to accommodate leap seconds.
629 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
631 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
632 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
633 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
635 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
637 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
638 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
639 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
641 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
642 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
643 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
644 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
645 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
649 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
650 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
651 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
652 directory or a symlink to a directory.
654 ** Changes in behavior
656 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
657 environment variable is set.
659 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
660 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
661 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
665 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
666 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
667 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
668 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
670 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
671 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
672 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
673 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
677 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
678 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
679 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
681 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
682 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
683 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
684 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
685 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
686 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
689 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
690 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
693 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
697 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
698 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
699 and libraries tested at configure time.
700 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
702 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
703 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
705 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
706 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
708 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
709 printing a summary to stderr.
710 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
712 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
713 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
714 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
716 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
717 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
719 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
720 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
721 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
722 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
724 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
725 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
726 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
727 which is relatively unusual.
728 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
730 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
731 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
732 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
733 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
734 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
735 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
736 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
740 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
741 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
742 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
743 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
744 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
748 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
749 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
751 ** Changes in behavior
753 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
754 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
755 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
756 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
757 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
760 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
764 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
765 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
767 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
768 before data copying has started.
770 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
771 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
773 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
774 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
775 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
776 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
778 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
779 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
780 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
781 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
783 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
788 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
789 for its standard streams.
791 ** Changes in behavior
793 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
794 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
795 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
796 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
797 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
798 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
800 ** Deprecated options
802 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
803 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
807 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
809 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
810 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
813 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
815 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
816 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
818 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
819 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
822 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
826 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
827 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
828 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
829 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
831 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
832 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
833 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
834 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
835 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
840 make check: two tests have been corrected
844 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
845 inherited from gnulib.
848 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
852 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
853 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
854 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
855 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
857 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
858 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
860 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
862 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
863 systems without xattr support.
865 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
866 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
867 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
869 ** Changes in behavior
871 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
872 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
873 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
874 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
876 ** Improved robustness
878 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
879 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
880 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
881 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
882 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
883 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
884 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
885 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
886 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
890 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
891 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
893 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
894 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
895 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
896 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
897 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
900 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
904 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
905 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
906 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
910 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
911 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
912 data was read, or on process exit.
913 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
915 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
916 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
917 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
918 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
920 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
921 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
922 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
923 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
925 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
926 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
928 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
929 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
931 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
932 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
933 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
935 ** Changes in behavior
937 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
938 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
939 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
941 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
942 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
944 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
945 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
946 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
949 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
953 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
955 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
956 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
957 install: Never copies xattrs
959 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
960 from overwriting any existing destination file
962 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
963 mode where this feature is available.
965 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
966 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
967 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
968 do not modify the destination at all.
970 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
972 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
976 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
977 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
979 cp uses much less memory in some situations
981 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
982 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
984 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
985 processing the first file name
987 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
988 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
989 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
990 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
992 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
993 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
995 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
996 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
999 ** Changes in behavior
1001 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1002 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1004 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1005 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1006 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1008 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1009 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1011 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1013 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1014 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1015 is still marked with a '+'.
1018 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1022 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1023 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1027 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1028 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1029 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1030 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1031 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1032 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1034 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1035 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1037 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1038 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1040 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1042 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1043 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1044 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1046 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1047 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1049 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1050 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1051 used to factor large numbers.
1053 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1056 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1058 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1060 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1061 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1063 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1064 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1065 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1066 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1068 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1069 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1070 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1072 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1073 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1077 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1079 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1080 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1082 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1083 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1085 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1087 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1088 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1092 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1093 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1094 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1096 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1098 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1099 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1100 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1102 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1103 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1104 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1106 ** Changes in behavior
1108 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1109 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1112 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1116 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1118 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1119 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1120 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1122 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1123 with no USERNAME argument.
1125 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1126 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1127 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1129 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1130 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1131 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1132 number of fields for some inputs.
1134 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1135 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1137 ** Changes in behavior
1139 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1140 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1143 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1147 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1149 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1150 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1151 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1152 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1154 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1155 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1157 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1158 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1160 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1161 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1163 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1164 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1165 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1166 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1168 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1169 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1170 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1171 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1172 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1173 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1175 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1176 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1178 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1179 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1180 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1182 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1183 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1185 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1186 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1188 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1189 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1190 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1191 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1193 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1194 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1196 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1197 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1199 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1200 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1201 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1205 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1206 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1208 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1209 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1210 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1211 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1215 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1216 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1218 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1220 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1224 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1225 which have negative errno values.
1229 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1233 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1237 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1238 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1241 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1245 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1246 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1247 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1249 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1250 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1251 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1252 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1256 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1257 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1258 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1259 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1262 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1266 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1268 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1269 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1270 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1273 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1277 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1278 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1280 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1282 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1284 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1286 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1290 ** Changes in behavior
1292 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1293 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1295 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1296 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1298 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1299 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1300 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1304 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1305 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1306 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1307 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1308 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1309 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1310 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1311 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1312 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1313 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1314 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1316 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1317 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1318 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1321 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1324 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1325 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1326 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1328 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1329 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1330 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1333 ** New build options
1335 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1336 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1337 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1338 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1340 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1341 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1342 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1343 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1344 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1345 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1346 of "make check" fail.
1348 ** Remove deprecated options
1350 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1351 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1352 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1353 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1354 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1356 ** Improved robustness
1358 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1359 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1360 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1361 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1362 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1363 loss of the contents of a/f.
1365 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1366 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1370 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1371 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1372 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1374 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1375 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1376 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1377 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1379 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1380 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1381 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1382 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1383 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1384 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1385 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1386 destination is a symlink.
1388 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1390 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1391 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1393 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1394 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1396 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1398 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1399 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1401 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1402 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1404 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1407 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1408 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1410 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1411 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1413 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1414 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1415 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1416 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1418 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1419 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1420 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1422 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1423 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1424 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1426 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1427 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1428 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1429 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1431 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1432 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1433 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1435 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1436 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1438 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1439 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1441 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1443 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1444 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1445 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1447 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1448 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1450 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1451 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1453 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1454 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1456 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1457 [present in the original version]
1460 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1464 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1466 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1467 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1468 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1470 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1471 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1473 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1477 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1478 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1480 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1481 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1483 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1484 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1486 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1487 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1488 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1489 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1490 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1491 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1493 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1494 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1497 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1498 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1500 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1503 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1504 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1505 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1507 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1508 directory is unreadable.
1510 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1511 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1512 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1514 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1515 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1516 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1517 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1518 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1521 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1522 Before it would print nothing.
1524 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1526 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1527 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1528 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1529 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1530 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1531 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1532 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1533 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1535 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1539 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1540 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1541 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1543 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1544 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1545 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1546 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1549 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1553 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1554 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1555 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1556 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1557 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1558 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1559 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1561 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1562 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1563 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1564 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1565 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1566 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1567 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1568 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1570 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1571 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1572 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1575 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1579 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1580 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1582 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1583 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1584 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1586 ** Improved robustness
1588 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1589 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1590 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1593 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1597 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1598 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1599 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1600 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1601 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1603 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1607 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1610 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1614 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1615 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1616 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1617 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1619 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1620 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1622 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1623 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1624 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1627 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1629 ** Improved robustness
1631 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1632 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1634 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1635 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1636 or NFS-mounted partition.
1638 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1639 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1643 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1644 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1645 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1646 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1647 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1648 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1650 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1651 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1653 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1654 or neglect to report file removal.
1656 For the "groups" command:
1658 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1659 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1661 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1663 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1665 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1669 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1670 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1673 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1675 ** Changes in behavior
1677 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1678 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1679 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1680 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1682 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1683 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1684 a final `./' or `../' component.
1686 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1687 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1688 this only for pipes.
1690 ** Infrastructure changes
1692 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1693 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1694 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1695 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1699 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1700 name is "." or "..".
1702 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1703 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1704 dirent.d_type support.
1706 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1707 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1709 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1710 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1711 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1712 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1715 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1717 ** Changes in behavior
1719 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1723 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1724 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1728 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1729 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1730 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1732 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1733 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1735 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1736 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1738 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1740 ** Improved robustness
1742 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1743 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1744 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1746 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1747 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1750 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1751 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1753 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1754 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1756 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1757 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1759 ** Changes in behavior
1761 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1762 where the two are distinct.
1764 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1765 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1766 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1767 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1768 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1769 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1770 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1771 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1772 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1773 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1774 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1775 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1776 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1777 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1778 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1779 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1780 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1782 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1783 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1784 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1786 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1787 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1788 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1789 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1792 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1793 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1797 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1798 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1799 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1800 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1802 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1803 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1804 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1806 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1807 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1808 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1809 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1810 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1813 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1814 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1816 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1817 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1818 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1819 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1821 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1822 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1823 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1825 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1826 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1827 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1828 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1830 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1831 and sticky) with the -m option.
1833 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1834 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1835 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1836 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1837 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1839 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1840 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1842 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1846 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1847 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1848 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1849 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1851 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1853 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1855 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1856 silently ignoring one of them.
1858 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1859 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1860 containing this change was 5.92.
1862 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1863 automatically newline terminated.
1865 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1866 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1867 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1868 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1871 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1872 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1873 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1876 ** Scheduled for removal
1878 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1879 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1881 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1882 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1883 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1884 command to unlink a directory.
1886 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1887 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1888 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1889 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1893 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1894 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1895 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1896 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1897 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1898 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1902 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1903 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1905 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1907 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1908 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1909 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1911 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1912 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1915 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1916 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1918 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1919 list directories before files.
1921 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1922 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1923 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1924 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1927 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1929 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1931 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1932 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1933 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1935 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1936 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1940 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1941 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1942 usually printing nothing.
1944 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1946 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1947 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1948 them with hard-linked directories.
1950 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1951 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1952 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1954 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1955 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1956 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1958 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1961 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1962 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1964 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1965 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1967 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1968 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1970 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1971 all command-line arguments.
1973 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1975 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1977 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1978 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1980 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1982 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1983 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1984 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1985 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1986 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1988 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1989 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1991 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1992 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1993 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1994 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1996 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1998 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2002 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2003 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2005 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2006 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2008 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
2009 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2011 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2012 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
2014 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2015 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2017 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2019 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2020 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2021 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2024 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2026 ** Build-related bug fixes
2028 installing .mo files would fail
2031 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2035 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2037 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2040 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2044 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2045 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2049 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2051 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2052 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2054 ** Deprecated options
2056 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2057 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
2059 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2063 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2065 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2066 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2067 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2068 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2070 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2073 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2079 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2084 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2086 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2088 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2089 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2090 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2092 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2093 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2094 problematic usages. These include:
2096 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2097 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2098 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2099 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2100 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2101 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2102 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2103 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2104 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2106 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2107 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2109 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2110 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2111 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2112 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2114 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2115 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2116 between binary and text files.
2118 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2122 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2126 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2127 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2129 head tac tail tee tr
2130 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2132 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2133 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2135 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2136 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2137 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2139 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2141 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2143 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2144 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2145 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2149 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2151 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2152 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2154 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2155 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2156 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2160 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2161 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2165 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2166 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2167 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2171 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2172 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2176 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2178 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2180 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2184 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2185 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2186 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2188 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2189 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2190 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2191 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2192 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2194 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2198 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2199 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2200 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2202 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2204 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2205 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2206 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2207 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2209 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2211 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2212 rather than silently wrapping around.
2214 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2215 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2217 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2218 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2220 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2221 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2222 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2223 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2225 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2227 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2229 ** Improved robustness
2231 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2232 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2233 no matter how large the result.
2235 ** Improved portability
2237 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2238 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2240 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2242 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2243 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2244 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2246 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2247 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2251 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2252 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2254 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2256 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2257 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2258 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2259 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2261 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2262 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2264 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2265 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2266 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2268 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2270 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2271 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2273 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2274 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2276 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2278 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2279 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2281 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2282 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2284 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2285 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2286 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2288 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2290 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2292 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2296 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2298 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2299 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2300 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2302 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2303 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2305 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2306 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2307 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2309 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2310 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2312 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2313 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2314 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2315 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2317 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2318 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2320 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2321 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2322 the file system does not support it.
2324 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2326 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2327 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2329 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2331 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2332 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2334 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2335 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2336 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2337 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2339 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2340 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2343 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2344 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2345 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2346 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2348 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2349 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2350 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2351 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2353 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2354 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2356 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2358 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2359 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2360 reporting incorrect results.
2364 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2365 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2367 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2370 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2372 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2373 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2375 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2376 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2378 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2381 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2382 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2383 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2384 the file name does not look like a page range.
2386 printf has several changes:
2388 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2389 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2391 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2392 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2393 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2395 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2396 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2399 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2400 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2402 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2403 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2405 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2407 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2408 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2410 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2412 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2414 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2415 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2416 when first encountering the directory.
2420 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2421 output; POSIX requires this.
2423 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2424 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2426 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2428 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2429 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2431 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2432 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2434 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2435 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2436 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2437 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2438 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2439 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2440 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2442 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2443 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2444 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2446 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2447 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2449 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2451 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2453 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2454 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2455 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2456 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2458 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2462 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2463 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2464 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2465 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2466 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2468 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2469 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2470 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2472 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2473 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2475 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2476 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2478 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2479 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2480 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2481 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2482 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2484 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2485 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2487 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2488 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2490 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2492 nocreat do not create the output file
2493 excl fail if the output file already exists
2494 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2495 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2497 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2499 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2500 direct use direct I/O for data
2501 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2502 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2503 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2504 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2505 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2507 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2509 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2510 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2513 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2514 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2515 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2516 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2517 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2518 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2520 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2521 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2523 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2526 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2528 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2530 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2531 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2533 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2534 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2535 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2537 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2538 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2539 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2541 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2543 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2544 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2546 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2547 for compatibility with bash.
2549 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2551 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2552 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2553 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2554 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2556 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2557 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2559 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2560 ls supports TABSIZE.
2561 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2562 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2563 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2565 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2568 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2570 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2571 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2572 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2573 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2574 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2575 an offset, not as a file name.
2577 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2578 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2580 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2581 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2583 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2584 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2586 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2587 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2588 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2590 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2591 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2593 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2594 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2598 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2600 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2602 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2606 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2607 or more arguments between partitions.
2609 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2610 holes in the destination.
2612 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2613 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2614 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2615 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2616 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2617 terminates immediately.
2619 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2621 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2623 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2624 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2625 not the empty string.
2627 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2628 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2632 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2633 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2634 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2637 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2644 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2648 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2649 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2651 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2652 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2654 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2655 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2656 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2659 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2663 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2664 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2666 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2667 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2669 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2670 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2671 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2673 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2675 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2678 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2680 ** Configuration option
2682 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2683 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2687 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2688 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2692 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2693 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2694 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2697 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2698 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2699 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2700 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2701 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2702 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2703 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2706 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2710 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2711 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2712 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2714 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2715 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2717 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2719 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2720 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2721 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2722 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2724 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2726 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2727 not just the ones that reference directories
2729 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2730 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2732 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2733 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2734 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2736 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2737 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2738 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2739 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2740 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2741 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2743 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2748 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2749 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2751 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2753 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2755 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2757 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2758 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2760 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2761 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2763 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2765 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2769 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2771 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2773 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2774 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2775 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2776 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2777 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2779 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2780 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2782 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2783 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2785 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2786 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2788 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2789 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2790 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2794 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2795 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2796 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2797 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2798 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2799 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2800 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2801 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2802 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2803 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2804 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2805 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2806 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2807 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2809 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2811 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2812 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2814 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2816 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2818 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2819 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2821 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2823 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2824 without a trailing newline.
2826 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2827 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2829 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2832 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2836 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2838 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2840 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2841 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2842 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2843 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2845 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2847 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2848 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2849 be printed without leading spaces.
2851 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2852 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2857 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2858 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2859 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2861 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2863 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2864 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2866 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2867 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2869 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2870 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2872 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2874 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2876 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2878 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2879 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2881 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2883 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2885 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2886 byte offsets are specified.
2889 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2892 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2895 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2896 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2897 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2898 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2899 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2900 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2901 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2902 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2903 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2904 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2905 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2906 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2907 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2908 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2909 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2910 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2911 directory where M has write access.
2912 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2913 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2914 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2917 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2918 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2919 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2920 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2921 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2922 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2923 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2924 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2925 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2926 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2927 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2928 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2929 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2930 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2931 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2932 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2933 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2934 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2935 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2936 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2937 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2938 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2939 appeared one additional time.
2941 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2942 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2943 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2944 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2947 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2948 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2949 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2950 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2951 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2952 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2953 if there were more than 338.
2955 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2956 - false --help now exits nonzero
2959 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2960 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2961 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2962 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2965 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2966 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2967 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2968 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2969 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2972 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2973 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2974 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2975 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2976 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2977 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2978 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2981 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2982 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2983 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2984 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2985 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2986 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2988 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2989 under certain unusual conditions
2990 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2991 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2994 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2995 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2996 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2997 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2998 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2999 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
3000 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3001 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3002 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
3003 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
3004 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3005 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3006 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3007 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3008 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3009 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3012 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3013 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3016 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3017 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3018 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3019 involving hard-linked directories
3020 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3021 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
3022 character-special and block files
3025 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3026 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3027 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3028 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3029 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3030 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3031 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3032 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3033 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3035 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
3036 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
3037 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3038 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3039 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3040 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3041 specified on the command line.
3042 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3043 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
3044 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3045 the first file untouched.
3046 * readlink: new program
3047 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3048 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3049 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3050 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3051 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3052 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3055 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3056 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3057 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3058 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3059 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3060 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3061 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3062 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3063 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3064 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3065 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3066 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3068 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3069 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3070 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3072 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3073 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3074 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3075 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3076 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3077 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3078 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3079 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3082 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3083 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3086 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3087 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3088 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3089 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3090 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3091 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3092 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3095 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3096 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3098 ========================================================================
3099 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3100 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3103 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3105 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3106 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3107 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3108 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3109 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3110 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3111 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3112 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3113 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3114 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3115 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3116 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3118 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3119 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3120 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3121 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3123 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3126 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3128 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3129 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3130 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3131 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3132 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3133 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3134 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3137 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3138 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3139 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3140 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3141 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3142 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3143 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3144 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3145 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3146 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3147 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3148 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3149 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3150 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3151 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3152 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3154 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3155 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3157 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3158 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3159 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3160 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3161 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3162 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3164 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3165 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3166 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3167 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3168 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3169 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3170 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3172 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3173 the source files in the following example:
3174 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3175 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3176 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3177 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3178 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3179 links between source files with --preserve=links
3180 * cp accepts new options:
3181 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3182 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3183 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3184 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3185 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3186 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3187 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3188 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3189 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3191 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3192 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3193 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3194 even though it's older than dest.
3195 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3196 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3197 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3198 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3199 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3201 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3202 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3203 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3204 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3205 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3206 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3207 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3209 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3210 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3211 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3213 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3214 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3215 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3216 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3217 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3218 This is the default.
3220 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3221 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3222 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3223 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3224 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3226 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3229 ========================================================================
3230 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3231 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3234 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3235 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3237 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3238 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3239 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3240 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3241 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3243 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3244 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3245 that specifies a non-directory
3248 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3249 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3250 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3251 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3252 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3253 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3254 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3255 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3256 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3257 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3258 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3259 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3260 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3261 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3262 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3263 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3264 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3265 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3266 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3267 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3268 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3269 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3270 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3271 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3273 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3274 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3275 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3277 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3279 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3280 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3282 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3283 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3284 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3285 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3286 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3288 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3289 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3290 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3291 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3292 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3294 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3296 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3297 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3298 * still more portability fixes
3299 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3300 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3302 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3304 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3306 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3308 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3309 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3310 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3311 there is any time remaining
3312 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3314 ========================================================================
3315 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3316 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3318 This package began as the union of the following:
3319 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3321 ========================================================================
3323 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3325 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3326 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3327 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3328 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3329 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3330 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.