1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
8 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
9 data was read, or on process exit.
10 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
12 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
13 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
14 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
15 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
17 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
18 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
19 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
20 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
22 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
23 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
25 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
26 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
28 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
29 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
30 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
32 ** Changes in behavior
34 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 32KiB
35 at a time. This was seen to increase throughput. Up to 2 times
36 when reading cached files on linux for example.
38 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
39 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
42 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
46 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
48 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
49 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
50 install: Never copies xattrs
52 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
53 from overwriting any existing destination file
55 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
56 mode where this feature is available.
58 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
59 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
60 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
61 do not modify the destination at all.
63 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
65 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
69 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
70 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
72 cp uses much less memory in some situations
74 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
75 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
77 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
78 processing the first file name
80 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
81 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
82 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
83 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
85 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
86 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
88 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
89 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
92 ** Changes in behavior
94 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
95 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
97 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
98 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
99 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
101 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
102 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
104 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
106 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
107 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
108 is still marked with a '+'.
111 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
115 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
116 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
120 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
121 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
122 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
123 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
124 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
125 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
127 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
128 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
130 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
131 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
133 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
135 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
136 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
137 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
139 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
140 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
142 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
143 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
144 used to factor large numbers.
146 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
149 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
151 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
153 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
154 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
156 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
157 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
158 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
159 maximum command-line (argv) length.
161 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
162 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
163 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
165 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
166 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
170 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
172 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
173 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
175 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
176 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
178 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
180 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
181 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
185 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
186 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
187 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
189 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
191 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
192 no matter how many files are in a given directory
194 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
195 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
196 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
198 ** Changes in behavior
200 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
201 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
204 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
208 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
210 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
211 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
212 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
214 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
215 with no USERNAME argument.
217 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
218 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
219 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
221 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
222 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
223 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
224 number of fields for some inputs.
226 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
227 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
229 ** Changes in behavior
231 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
232 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
235 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
239 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
241 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
242 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
243 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
244 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
246 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
247 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
249 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
250 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
252 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
253 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
255 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
256 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
257 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
258 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
260 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
261 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
262 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
263 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
264 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
265 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
267 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
268 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
270 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
271 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
272 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
274 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
275 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
277 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
278 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
280 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
281 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
282 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
283 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
285 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
286 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
288 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
289 in more cases when a directory is empty.
291 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
292 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
293 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
297 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
298 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
300 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
301 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
302 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
303 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
307 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
308 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
310 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
312 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
316 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
317 which have negative errno values.
321 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
325 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
329 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
330 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
333 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
337 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
338 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
339 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
341 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
342 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
343 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
344 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
348 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
349 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
350 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
351 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
354 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
358 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
360 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
361 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
362 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
365 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
369 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
370 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
372 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
374 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
376 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
378 ** Programs no longer installed by default
382 ** Changes in behavior
384 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
385 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
387 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
388 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
390 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
391 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
392 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
396 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
397 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
398 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
399 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
400 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
401 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
402 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
403 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
404 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
405 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
406 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
408 The following commands and options now support the standard size
409 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
410 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
413 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
416 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
417 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
418 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
420 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
421 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
422 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
427 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
428 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
429 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
430 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
432 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
433 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
434 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
435 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
436 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
437 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
438 of "make check" fail.
440 ** Remove deprecated options
442 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
443 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
444 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
445 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
446 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
448 ** Improved robustness
450 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
451 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
452 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
453 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
454 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
455 loss of the contents of a/f.
457 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
458 in its 35-colon command-line argument
462 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
463 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
464 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
466 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
467 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
468 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
469 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
471 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
472 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
473 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
474 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
475 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
476 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
477 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
478 destination is a symlink.
480 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
482 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
483 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
485 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
486 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
488 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
490 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
491 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
493 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
494 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
496 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
499 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
500 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
502 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
503 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
505 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
506 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
507 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
508 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
510 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
511 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
512 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
514 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
515 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
516 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
518 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
519 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
520 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
521 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
523 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
524 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
525 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
527 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
528 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
530 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
531 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
533 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
535 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
536 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
537 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
539 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
540 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
542 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
543 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
545 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
546 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
548 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
549 [present in the original version]
552 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
556 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
558 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
559 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
560 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
562 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
563 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
565 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
569 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
570 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
572 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
573 support but with insufficient /proc support.
575 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
576 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
578 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
579 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
580 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
581 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
582 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
583 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
585 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
586 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
589 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
590 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
592 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
595 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
596 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
597 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
599 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
600 directory is unreadable.
602 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
603 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
604 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
606 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
607 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
608 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
609 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
610 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
613 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
614 Before it would print nothing.
616 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
618 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
619 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
620 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
621 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
622 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
623 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
624 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
625 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
627 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
631 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
632 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
633 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
635 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
636 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
637 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
638 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
641 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
645 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
646 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
647 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
648 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
649 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
650 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
651 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
653 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
654 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
655 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
656 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
657 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
658 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
659 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
660 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
662 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
663 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
664 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
667 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
671 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
672 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
674 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
675 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
676 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
678 ** Improved robustness
680 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
681 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
682 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
685 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
689 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
690 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
691 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
692 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
693 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
695 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
699 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
702 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
706 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
707 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
708 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
709 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
711 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
712 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
714 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
715 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
716 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
719 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
721 ** Improved robustness
723 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
724 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
726 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
727 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
728 or NFS-mounted partition.
730 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
731 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
735 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
736 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
737 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
738 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
739 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
740 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
742 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
743 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
745 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
746 or neglect to report file removal.
748 For the "groups" command:
750 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
751 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
753 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
755 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
757 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
761 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
762 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
765 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
767 ** Changes in behavior
769 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
770 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
771 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
772 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
774 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
775 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
776 a final `./' or `../' component.
778 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
779 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
782 ** Infrastructure changes
784 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
785 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
786 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
787 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
791 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
794 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
795 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
796 dirent.d_type support.
798 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
799 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
801 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
802 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
803 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
804 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
807 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
809 ** Changes in behavior
811 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
815 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
816 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
820 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
821 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
822 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
824 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
825 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
827 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
828 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
830 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
832 ** Improved robustness
834 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
835 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
836 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
838 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
839 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
842 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
843 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
845 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
846 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
848 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
849 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
851 ** Changes in behavior
853 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
854 where the two are distinct.
856 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
857 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
858 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
859 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
860 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
861 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
862 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
863 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
864 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
865 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
866 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
867 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
868 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
869 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
870 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
871 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
872 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
874 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
875 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
876 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
878 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
879 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
880 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
881 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
884 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
885 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
889 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
890 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
891 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
892 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
894 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
895 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
896 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
898 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
899 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
900 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
901 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
902 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
905 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
906 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
908 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
909 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
910 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
911 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
913 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
914 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
915 successful and the output is easier to parse.
917 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
918 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
919 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
920 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
922 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
923 and sticky) with the -m option.
925 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
926 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
927 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
928 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
929 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
931 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
932 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
934 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
938 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
939 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
940 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
941 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
943 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
945 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
947 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
948 silently ignoring one of them.
950 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
951 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
952 containing this change was 5.92.
954 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
955 automatically newline terminated.
957 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
958 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
959 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
960 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
963 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
964 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
965 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
968 ** Scheduled for removal
970 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
971 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
973 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
974 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
975 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
976 command to unlink a directory.
978 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
979 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
980 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
981 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
985 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
986 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
987 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
988 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
989 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
990 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
994 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
995 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
997 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
999 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1000 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1001 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1003 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1004 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1007 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1008 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1010 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1011 list directories before files.
1013 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1014 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1015 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1016 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1019 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1021 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1023 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1024 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1025 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1027 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1028 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1032 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1033 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1034 usually printing nothing.
1036 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1038 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1039 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1040 them with hard-linked directories.
1042 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1043 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1044 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1046 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1047 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1048 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1050 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1053 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1054 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1056 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1057 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1059 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1060 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1062 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1063 all command-line arguments.
1065 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1067 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1069 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1070 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1072 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1074 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1075 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1076 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1077 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1078 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1080 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1081 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1083 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1084 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1085 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1086 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1088 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1090 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1094 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1095 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1097 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1098 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1100 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1101 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1103 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1104 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1106 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1107 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1109 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1111 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1112 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1113 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1116 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1118 ** Build-related bug fixes
1120 installing .mo files would fail
1123 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1127 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1129 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1132 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1136 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1137 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1141 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1143 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1144 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1146 ** Deprecated options
1148 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1149 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1151 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1155 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1157 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1158 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1159 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1160 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1162 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1165 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1171 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1176 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1178 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1180 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1181 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1182 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1184 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1185 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1186 problematic usages. These include:
1188 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1189 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1190 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1191 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1192 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1193 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1194 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1195 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1196 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1198 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1199 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1201 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1202 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1203 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1204 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1206 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1207 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1208 between binary and text files.
1210 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1214 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1218 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1219 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1221 head tac tail tee tr
1222 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1224 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1225 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1227 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1228 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1229 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1231 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1233 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1235 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1236 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1237 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1241 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1243 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1244 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1246 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1247 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1248 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1252 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1253 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1257 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1258 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1259 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1263 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1264 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1268 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1270 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1272 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1276 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1277 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1278 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1280 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1281 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1282 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1283 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1284 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1286 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
1290 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
1291 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
1292 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
1294 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
1296 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
1297 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
1298 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
1299 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
1301 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
1303 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
1304 rather than silently wrapping around.
1306 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
1307 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
1309 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
1310 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
1312 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
1313 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
1314 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
1315 file /tmp/a/b/file".
1317 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
1319 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
1321 ** Improved robustness
1323 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
1324 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
1325 no matter how large the result.
1327 ** Improved portability
1329 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
1330 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
1332 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
1334 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
1335 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
1336 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
1338 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
1339 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
1343 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
1344 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
1346 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
1348 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
1349 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
1350 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
1351 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
1353 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
1354 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
1356 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
1357 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
1358 categories if not specified by dircolors.
1360 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
1362 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
1363 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
1365 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
1366 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
1368 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
1370 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
1371 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
1373 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
1374 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
1376 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
1377 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
1378 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
1380 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
1382 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
1384 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
1388 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
1390 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
1391 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
1392 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
1394 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
1395 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
1397 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
1398 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
1399 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
1401 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
1402 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
1404 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
1405 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
1406 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
1407 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
1409 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
1410 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
1412 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
1413 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
1414 the file system does not support it.
1416 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
1418 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
1419 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
1421 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
1423 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
1424 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
1426 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
1427 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
1428 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
1429 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
1431 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
1432 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
1435 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
1436 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
1437 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
1438 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
1440 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
1441 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
1442 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
1443 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
1445 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
1446 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
1448 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
1450 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
1451 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
1452 reporting incorrect results.
1456 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
1457 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
1459 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
1462 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
1464 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
1465 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
1467 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
1468 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
1470 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
1473 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
1474 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
1475 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
1476 the file name does not look like a page range.
1478 printf has several changes:
1480 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
1481 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
1483 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
1484 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
1485 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
1487 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
1488 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
1491 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
1492 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
1494 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
1495 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
1497 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
1499 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
1500 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
1502 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
1504 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
1506 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
1507 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
1508 when first encountering the directory.
1512 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
1513 output; POSIX requires this.
1515 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
1516 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
1518 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
1520 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
1521 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
1523 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
1524 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
1526 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
1527 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
1528 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
1529 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
1530 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
1531 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
1532 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
1534 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
1535 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
1536 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
1538 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
1539 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
1541 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
1543 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
1545 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
1546 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
1547 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
1548 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
1550 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
1554 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
1555 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
1556 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
1557 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
1558 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
1560 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
1561 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
1562 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
1564 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
1565 is longer than PATH_MAX.
1567 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
1568 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
1570 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
1571 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
1572 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
1573 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
1574 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
1576 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
1577 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
1579 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
1580 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
1582 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
1584 nocreat do not create the output file
1585 excl fail if the output file already exists
1586 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
1587 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
1589 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
1591 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
1592 direct use direct I/O for data
1593 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
1594 sync likewise, but also for metadata
1595 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
1596 nofollow do not follow symlinks
1597 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
1599 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
1601 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
1602 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
1605 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
1606 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
1607 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
1608 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
1609 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
1610 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
1612 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1613 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1615 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
1618 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
1620 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
1622 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
1623 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
1625 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
1626 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
1627 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
1629 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
1630 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
1631 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
1633 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
1635 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
1636 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
1638 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
1639 for compatibility with bash.
1641 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
1643 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
1644 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
1645 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
1646 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
1648 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
1649 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
1651 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
1652 ls supports TABSIZE.
1653 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
1654 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
1655 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
1657 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
1660 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
1662 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
1663 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
1664 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
1665 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
1666 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
1667 an offset, not as a file name.
1669 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
1670 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
1672 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
1673 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
1675 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
1676 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
1678 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
1679 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
1680 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
1682 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
1683 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
1685 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
1686 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
1690 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
1692 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
1694 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
1698 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
1699 or more arguments between partitions.
1701 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
1702 holes in the destination.
1704 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
1705 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
1706 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
1707 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
1708 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
1709 terminates immediately.
1711 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
1713 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
1715 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
1716 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
1717 not the empty string.
1719 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
1720 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
1724 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
1725 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
1726 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
1729 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
1736 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
1740 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
1741 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
1743 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
1744 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
1746 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
1747 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
1748 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
1751 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
1755 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
1756 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
1758 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
1759 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
1761 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
1762 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
1763 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
1765 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
1767 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
1770 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
1772 ** Configuration option
1774 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
1775 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
1779 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
1780 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
1784 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
1785 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
1786 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
1789 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
1790 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
1791 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
1792 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
1793 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
1794 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
1795 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
1798 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
1802 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
1803 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
1804 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
1806 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
1807 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
1809 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
1811 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
1812 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
1813 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
1814 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
1816 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
1818 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
1819 not just the ones that reference directories
1821 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
1822 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
1824 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
1825 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
1826 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
1828 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
1829 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
1830 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
1831 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
1832 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
1833 ragged when a datum was too wide.
1835 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
1840 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
1841 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
1843 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
1845 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
1847 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
1849 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
1850 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
1852 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
1853 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
1855 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
1857 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
1861 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
1863 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
1865 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
1866 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
1867 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
1868 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
1869 resolution is the best we can do right now.
1871 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
1872 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
1874 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
1875 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
1877 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
1878 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
1880 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
1881 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
1882 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
1886 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
1887 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
1888 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
1889 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
1890 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
1891 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
1892 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
1893 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
1894 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
1895 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
1896 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
1897 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
1898 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
1899 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
1901 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
1903 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
1904 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
1906 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
1908 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
1910 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
1911 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
1913 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
1915 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
1916 without a trailing newline.
1918 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
1919 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
1921 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
1924 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
1928 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
1930 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
1932 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
1933 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
1934 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
1935 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
1937 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
1939 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
1940 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
1941 be printed without leading spaces.
1943 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
1944 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
1949 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
1950 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
1951 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
1953 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
1955 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
1956 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
1958 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
1959 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
1961 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
1962 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
1964 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
1966 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
1968 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
1970 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
1971 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
1973 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
1975 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
1977 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
1978 byte offsets are specified.
1981 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
1984 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
1987 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
1988 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
1989 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
1990 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
1991 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
1992 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
1993 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
1994 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
1995 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
1996 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
1997 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
1998 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
1999 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2000 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2001 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2002 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2003 directory where M has write access.
2004 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2005 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2006 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2009 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2010 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2011 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2012 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2013 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2014 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2015 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2016 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2017 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2018 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2019 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2020 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2021 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2022 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2023 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2024 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2025 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2026 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2027 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2028 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2029 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2030 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2031 appeared one additional time.
2033 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2034 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2035 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2036 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2039 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2040 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2041 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2042 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2043 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2044 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2045 if there were more than 338.
2047 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2048 - false --help now exits nonzero
2051 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2052 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2053 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2054 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2057 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2058 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2059 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2060 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2061 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2064 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2065 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2066 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2067 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2068 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2069 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2070 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2073 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2074 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2075 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2076 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2077 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2078 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2080 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2081 under certain unusual conditions
2082 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2083 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2086 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2087 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2088 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2089 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2090 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2091 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2092 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2093 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2094 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2095 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2096 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2097 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2098 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2099 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2100 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2101 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2104 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2105 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2108 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2109 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2110 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2111 involving hard-linked directories
2112 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2113 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2114 character-special and block files
2117 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2118 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2119 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2120 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2121 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2122 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2123 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2124 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2125 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2127 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2128 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2129 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2130 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2131 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2132 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2133 specified on the command line.
2134 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2135 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2136 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2137 the first file untouched.
2138 * readlink: new program
2139 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2140 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2141 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2142 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2143 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2144 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2147 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2148 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2149 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2150 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2151 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2152 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2153 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2154 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2155 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2156 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2157 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2158 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2160 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2161 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2162 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2164 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2165 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2166 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2167 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2168 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2169 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2170 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2171 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2174 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2175 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2178 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2179 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2180 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2181 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2182 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2183 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2184 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2187 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2188 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2190 ========================================================================
2191 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2192 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2195 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2197 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2198 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2199 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2200 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2201 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2202 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2203 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2204 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2205 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2206 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2207 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2208 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2210 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2211 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2212 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2213 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2215 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2218 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2220 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2221 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2222 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2223 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2224 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2225 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2226 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2229 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2230 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2231 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2232 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2233 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2234 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2235 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2236 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2237 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2238 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2239 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2240 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2241 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2242 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2243 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2244 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2246 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2247 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2249 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2250 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2251 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2252 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2253 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2254 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2256 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2257 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2258 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2259 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2260 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2261 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2262 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2264 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2265 the source files in the following example:
2266 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2267 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2268 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2269 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2270 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2271 links between source files with --preserve=links
2272 * cp accepts new options:
2273 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2274 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2275 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2276 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2277 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2278 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2279 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2280 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2281 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2283 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2284 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2285 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2286 even though it's older than dest.
2287 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
2288 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
2289 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
2290 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
2291 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
2293 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
2294 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
2295 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
2296 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
2297 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
2298 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
2299 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
2301 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
2302 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
2303 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
2305 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
2306 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
2307 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
2308 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
2309 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
2310 This is the default.
2312 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
2313 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
2314 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
2315 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
2316 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
2318 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
2321 ========================================================================
2322 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
2323 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2326 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
2327 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
2329 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2330 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
2331 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
2332 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
2333 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
2335 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
2336 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
2337 that specifies a non-directory
2340 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
2341 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
2342 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
2343 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
2344 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2345 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
2346 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
2347 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2348 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
2349 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
2350 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
2351 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
2352 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
2353 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
2354 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
2355 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
2356 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
2357 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
2358 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
2359 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
2360 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
2361 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
2362 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
2363 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
2365 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
2366 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
2367 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
2369 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
2371 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
2372 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
2374 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
2375 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
2376 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
2377 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
2378 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
2380 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
2381 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
2382 required support; from Bruno Haible.
2383 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
2384 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
2386 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
2388 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
2389 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
2390 * still more portability fixes
2391 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
2392 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2394 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
2396 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
2398 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
2400 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
2401 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
2402 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
2403 there is any time remaining
2404 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
2406 ========================================================================
2407 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2408 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
2410 This package began as the union of the following:
2411 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
2413 ========================================================================
2415 Copyright (C) 2001-2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
2417 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
2418 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
2419 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
2420 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
2421 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
2422 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.