1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
8 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
9 and libraries tested at configure time.
10 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
12 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
13 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
15 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
16 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
18 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
19 printing a summary to stderr.
20 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
22 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
23 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
25 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
26 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
27 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
28 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
30 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
31 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
32 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
33 which is relatively unusual.
34 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
36 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
37 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
38 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
39 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
40 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
41 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
42 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
46 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
47 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
51 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO, per POSIX.
52 Now, :|tail -f terminates immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
53 [the old behavior dates back to the original implementation]
56 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
60 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
61 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
63 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
64 before data copying has started.
66 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
67 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
69 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
70 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
71 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
72 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
74 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
75 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
76 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
77 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
79 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
84 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
85 for its standard streams.
87 ** Changes in behavior
89 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
90 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
91 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
92 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
93 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
94 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
98 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
99 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
103 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
105 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
106 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
109 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
111 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
112 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
114 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
115 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
118 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
122 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
123 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
124 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
125 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
127 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
128 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
129 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
130 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
131 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
136 make check: two tests have been corrected
140 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
141 inherited from gnulib.
144 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
148 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
149 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
150 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
151 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
153 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
154 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
156 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
158 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
159 systems without xattr support.
161 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
162 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
163 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
165 ** Changes in behavior
167 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
168 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
169 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
170 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
172 ** Improved robustness
174 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
175 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
176 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
177 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
178 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
179 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
180 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
181 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
182 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
186 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
187 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
189 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
190 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
191 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
192 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
193 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
196 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
200 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
201 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
202 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
206 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
207 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
208 data was read, or on process exit.
209 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
211 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
212 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
213 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
214 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
216 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
217 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
218 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
219 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
221 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
222 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
224 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
225 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
227 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
228 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
229 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
231 ** Changes in behavior
233 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
234 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
235 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
237 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
238 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
240 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
241 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
242 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
245 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
249 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
251 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
252 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
253 install: Never copies xattrs
255 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
256 from overwriting any existing destination file
258 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
259 mode where this feature is available.
261 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
262 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
263 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
264 do not modify the destination at all.
266 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
268 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
272 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
273 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
275 cp uses much less memory in some situations
277 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
278 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
280 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
281 processing the first file name
283 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
284 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
285 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
286 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
288 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
289 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
291 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
292 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
295 ** Changes in behavior
297 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
298 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
300 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
301 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
302 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
304 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
305 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
307 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
309 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
310 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
311 is still marked with a '+'.
314 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
318 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
319 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
323 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
324 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
325 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
326 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
327 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
328 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
330 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
331 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
333 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
334 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
336 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
338 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
339 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
340 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
342 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
343 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
345 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
346 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
347 used to factor large numbers.
349 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
352 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
354 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
356 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
357 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
359 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
360 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
361 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
362 maximum command-line (argv) length.
364 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
365 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
366 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
368 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
369 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
373 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
375 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
376 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
378 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
379 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
381 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
383 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
384 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
388 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
389 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
390 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
392 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
394 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
395 no matter how many files are in a given directory
397 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
398 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
399 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
401 ** Changes in behavior
403 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
404 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
407 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
411 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
413 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
414 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
415 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
417 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
418 with no USERNAME argument.
420 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
421 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
422 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
424 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
425 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
426 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
427 number of fields for some inputs.
429 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
430 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
432 ** Changes in behavior
434 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
435 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
438 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
442 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
444 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
445 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
446 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
447 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
449 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
450 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
452 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
453 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
455 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
456 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
458 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
459 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
460 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
461 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
463 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
464 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
465 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
466 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
467 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
468 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
470 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
471 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
473 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
474 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
475 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
477 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
478 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
480 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
481 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
483 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
484 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
485 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
486 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
488 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
489 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
491 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
492 in more cases when a directory is empty.
494 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
495 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
496 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
500 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
501 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
503 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
504 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
505 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
506 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
510 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
511 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
513 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
515 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
519 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
520 which have negative errno values.
524 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
528 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
532 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
533 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
536 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
540 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
541 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
542 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
544 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
545 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
546 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
547 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
551 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
552 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
553 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
554 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
557 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
561 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
563 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
564 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
565 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
568 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
572 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
573 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
575 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
577 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
579 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
581 ** Programs no longer installed by default
585 ** Changes in behavior
587 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
588 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
590 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
591 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
593 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
594 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
595 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
599 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
600 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
601 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
602 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
603 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
604 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
605 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
606 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
607 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
608 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
609 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
611 The following commands and options now support the standard size
612 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
613 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
616 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
619 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
620 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
621 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
623 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
624 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
625 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
630 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
631 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
632 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
633 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
635 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
636 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
637 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
638 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
639 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
640 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
641 of "make check" fail.
643 ** Remove deprecated options
645 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
646 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
647 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
648 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
649 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
651 ** Improved robustness
653 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
654 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
655 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
656 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
657 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
658 loss of the contents of a/f.
660 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
661 in its 35-colon command-line argument
665 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
666 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
667 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
669 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
670 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
671 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
672 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
674 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
675 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
676 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
677 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
678 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
679 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
680 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
681 destination is a symlink.
683 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
685 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
686 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
688 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
689 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
691 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
693 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
694 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
696 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
697 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
699 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
702 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
703 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
705 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
706 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
708 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
709 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
710 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
711 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
713 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
714 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
715 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
717 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
718 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
719 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
721 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
722 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
723 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
724 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
726 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
727 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
728 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
730 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
731 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
733 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
734 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
736 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
738 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
739 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
740 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
742 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
743 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
745 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
746 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
748 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
749 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
751 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
752 [present in the original version]
755 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
759 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
761 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
762 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
763 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
765 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
766 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
768 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
772 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
773 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
775 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
776 support but with insufficient /proc support.
778 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
779 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
781 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
782 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
783 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
784 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
785 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
786 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
788 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
789 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
792 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
793 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
795 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
798 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
799 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
800 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
802 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
803 directory is unreadable.
805 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
806 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
807 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
809 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
810 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
811 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
812 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
813 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
816 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
817 Before it would print nothing.
819 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
821 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
822 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
823 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
824 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
825 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
826 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
827 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
828 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
830 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
834 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
835 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
836 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
838 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
839 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
840 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
841 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
844 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
848 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
849 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
850 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
851 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
852 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
853 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
854 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
856 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
857 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
858 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
859 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
860 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
861 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
862 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
863 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
865 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
866 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
867 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
870 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
874 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
875 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
877 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
878 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
879 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
881 ** Improved robustness
883 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
884 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
885 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
888 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
892 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
893 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
894 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
895 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
896 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
898 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
902 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
905 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
909 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
910 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
911 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
912 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
914 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
915 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
917 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
918 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
919 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
922 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
924 ** Improved robustness
926 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
927 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
929 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
930 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
931 or NFS-mounted partition.
933 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
934 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
938 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
939 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
940 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
941 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
942 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
943 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
945 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
946 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
948 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
949 or neglect to report file removal.
951 For the "groups" command:
953 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
954 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
956 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
958 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
960 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
964 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
965 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
968 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
970 ** Changes in behavior
972 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
973 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
974 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
975 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
977 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
978 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
979 a final `./' or `../' component.
981 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
982 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
985 ** Infrastructure changes
987 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
988 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
989 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
990 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
994 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
997 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
998 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
999 dirent.d_type support.
1001 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1002 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1004 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1005 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1006 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1007 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1010 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1012 ** Changes in behavior
1014 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1018 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1019 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1023 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1024 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1025 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1027 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1028 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1030 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1031 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1033 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1035 ** Improved robustness
1037 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1038 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1039 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1041 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1042 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1045 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1046 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1048 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1049 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1051 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1052 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1054 ** Changes in behavior
1056 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1057 where the two are distinct.
1059 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1060 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1061 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1062 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1063 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1064 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1065 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1066 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1067 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1068 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1069 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1070 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1071 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1072 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1073 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1074 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1075 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1077 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1078 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1079 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1081 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1082 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1083 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1084 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1087 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1088 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1092 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1093 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1094 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1095 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1097 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1098 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1099 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1101 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1102 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1103 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1104 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1105 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1108 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1109 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1111 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1112 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1113 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1114 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1116 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1117 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1118 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1120 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1121 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1122 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1123 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1125 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1126 and sticky) with the -m option.
1128 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1129 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1130 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1131 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1132 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1134 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1135 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1137 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1141 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1142 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1143 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1144 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1146 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1148 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1150 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1151 silently ignoring one of them.
1153 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1154 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1155 containing this change was 5.92.
1157 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1158 automatically newline terminated.
1160 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1161 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1162 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1163 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1166 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1167 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1168 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1171 ** Scheduled for removal
1173 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1174 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1176 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1177 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1178 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1179 command to unlink a directory.
1181 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1182 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1183 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1184 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1188 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1189 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1190 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1191 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1192 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1193 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1197 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1198 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1200 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1202 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1203 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1204 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1206 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1207 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1210 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1211 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1213 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1214 list directories before files.
1216 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1217 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1218 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1219 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1222 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1224 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1226 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1227 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1228 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1230 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1231 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1235 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1236 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1237 usually printing nothing.
1239 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1241 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1242 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1243 them with hard-linked directories.
1245 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1246 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1247 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1249 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1250 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1251 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1253 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1256 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1257 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1259 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1260 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1262 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1263 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1265 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1266 all command-line arguments.
1268 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1270 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1272 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1273 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1275 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1277 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1278 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1279 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1280 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1281 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1283 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1284 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1286 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1287 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1288 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1289 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1291 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1293 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1297 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1298 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1300 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1301 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1303 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1304 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1306 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1307 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1309 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1310 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1312 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1314 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1315 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1316 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1319 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1321 ** Build-related bug fixes
1323 installing .mo files would fail
1326 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1330 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1332 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1335 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1339 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1340 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1344 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1346 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1347 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1349 ** Deprecated options
1351 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1352 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1354 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1358 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1360 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1361 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1362 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1363 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1365 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1368 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1374 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1379 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1381 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1383 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1384 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1385 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1387 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1388 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1389 problematic usages. These include:
1391 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1392 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1393 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1394 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1395 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1396 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1397 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1398 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1399 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1401 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1402 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1404 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1405 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1406 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1407 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1409 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1410 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1411 between binary and text files.
1413 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1417 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1421 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1422 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1424 head tac tail tee tr
1425 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1427 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1428 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1430 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1431 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1432 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1434 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1436 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1438 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1439 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1440 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1444 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1446 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1447 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1449 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1450 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1451 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1455 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1456 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1460 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1461 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1462 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1466 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1467 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1471 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1473 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1475 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1479 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1480 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1481 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1483 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1484 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1485 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1486 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1487 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1489 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
1493 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
1494 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
1495 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
1497 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
1499 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
1500 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
1501 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
1502 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
1504 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
1506 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
1507 rather than silently wrapping around.
1509 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
1510 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
1512 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
1513 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
1515 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
1516 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
1517 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
1518 file /tmp/a/b/file".
1520 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
1522 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
1524 ** Improved robustness
1526 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
1527 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
1528 no matter how large the result.
1530 ** Improved portability
1532 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
1533 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
1535 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
1537 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
1538 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
1539 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
1541 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
1542 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
1546 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
1547 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
1549 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
1551 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
1552 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
1553 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
1554 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
1556 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
1557 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
1559 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
1560 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
1561 categories if not specified by dircolors.
1563 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
1565 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
1566 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
1568 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
1569 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
1571 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
1573 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
1574 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
1576 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
1577 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
1579 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
1580 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
1581 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
1583 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
1585 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
1587 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
1591 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
1593 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
1594 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
1595 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
1597 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
1598 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
1600 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
1601 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
1602 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
1604 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
1605 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
1607 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
1608 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
1609 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
1610 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
1612 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
1613 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
1615 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
1616 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
1617 the file system does not support it.
1619 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
1621 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
1622 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
1624 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
1626 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
1627 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
1629 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
1630 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
1631 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
1632 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
1634 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
1635 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
1638 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
1639 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
1640 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
1641 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
1643 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
1644 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
1645 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
1646 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
1648 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
1649 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
1651 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
1653 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
1654 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
1655 reporting incorrect results.
1659 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
1660 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
1662 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
1665 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
1667 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
1668 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
1670 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
1671 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
1673 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
1676 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
1677 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
1678 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
1679 the file name does not look like a page range.
1681 printf has several changes:
1683 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
1684 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
1686 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
1687 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
1688 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
1690 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
1691 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
1694 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
1695 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
1697 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
1698 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
1700 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
1702 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
1703 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
1705 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
1707 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
1709 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
1710 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
1711 when first encountering the directory.
1715 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
1716 output; POSIX requires this.
1718 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
1719 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
1721 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
1723 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
1724 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
1726 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
1727 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
1729 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
1730 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
1731 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
1732 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
1733 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
1734 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
1735 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
1737 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
1738 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
1739 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
1741 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
1742 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
1744 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
1746 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
1748 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
1749 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
1750 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
1751 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
1753 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
1757 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
1758 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
1759 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
1760 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
1761 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
1763 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
1764 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
1765 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
1767 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
1768 is longer than PATH_MAX.
1770 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
1771 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
1773 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
1774 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
1775 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
1776 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
1777 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
1779 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
1780 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
1782 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
1783 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
1785 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
1787 nocreat do not create the output file
1788 excl fail if the output file already exists
1789 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
1790 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
1792 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
1794 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
1795 direct use direct I/O for data
1796 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
1797 sync likewise, but also for metadata
1798 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
1799 nofollow do not follow symlinks
1800 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
1802 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
1804 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
1805 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
1808 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
1809 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
1810 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
1811 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
1812 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
1813 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
1815 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1816 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1818 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
1821 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
1823 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
1825 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
1826 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
1828 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
1829 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
1830 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
1832 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
1833 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
1834 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
1836 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
1838 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
1839 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
1841 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
1842 for compatibility with bash.
1844 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
1846 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
1847 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
1848 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
1849 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
1851 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
1852 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
1854 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
1855 ls supports TABSIZE.
1856 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
1857 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
1858 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
1860 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
1863 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
1865 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
1866 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
1867 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
1868 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
1869 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
1870 an offset, not as a file name.
1872 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
1873 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
1875 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
1876 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
1878 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
1879 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
1881 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
1882 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
1883 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
1885 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
1886 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
1888 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
1889 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
1893 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
1895 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
1897 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
1901 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
1902 or more arguments between partitions.
1904 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
1905 holes in the destination.
1907 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
1908 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
1909 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
1910 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
1911 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
1912 terminates immediately.
1914 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
1916 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
1918 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
1919 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
1920 not the empty string.
1922 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
1923 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
1927 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
1928 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
1929 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
1932 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
1939 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
1943 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
1944 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
1946 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
1947 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
1949 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
1950 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
1951 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
1954 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
1958 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
1959 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
1961 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
1962 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
1964 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
1965 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
1966 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
1968 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
1970 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
1973 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
1975 ** Configuration option
1977 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
1978 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
1982 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
1983 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
1987 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
1988 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
1989 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
1992 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
1993 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
1994 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
1995 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
1996 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
1997 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
1998 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2001 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2005 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2006 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2007 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2009 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2010 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2012 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2014 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2015 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2016 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2017 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2019 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2021 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2022 not just the ones that reference directories
2024 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2025 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2027 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2028 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2029 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2031 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2032 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2033 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2034 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2035 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2036 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2038 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2043 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2044 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2046 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2048 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2050 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2052 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2053 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2055 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2056 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2058 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2060 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2064 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2066 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2068 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2069 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2070 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2071 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2072 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2074 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2075 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2077 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2078 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2080 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2081 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2083 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2084 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2085 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2089 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2090 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2091 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2092 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2093 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2094 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2095 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2096 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2097 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2098 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2099 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2100 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2101 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2102 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2104 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2106 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2107 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2109 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2111 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2113 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2114 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2116 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2118 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2119 without a trailing newline.
2121 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2122 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2124 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2127 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2131 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2133 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2135 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2136 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2137 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2138 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2140 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2142 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2143 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2144 be printed without leading spaces.
2146 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2147 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2152 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2153 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2154 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2156 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2158 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2159 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2161 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2162 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2164 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2165 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2167 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2169 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2171 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2173 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2174 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2176 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2178 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2180 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2181 byte offsets are specified.
2184 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2187 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2190 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2191 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2192 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2193 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2194 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2195 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2196 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2197 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2198 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2199 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2200 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2201 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2202 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2203 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2204 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2205 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2206 directory where M has write access.
2207 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2208 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2209 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2212 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2213 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2214 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2215 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2216 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2217 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2218 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2219 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2220 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2221 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2222 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2223 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2224 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2225 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2226 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2227 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2228 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2229 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2230 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2231 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2232 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2233 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2234 appeared one additional time.
2236 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2237 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2238 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2239 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2242 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2243 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2244 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2245 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2246 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2247 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2248 if there were more than 338.
2250 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2251 - false --help now exits nonzero
2254 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2255 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2256 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2257 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2260 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2261 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2262 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2263 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2264 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2267 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2268 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2269 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2270 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2271 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2272 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2273 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2276 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2277 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2278 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2279 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2280 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2281 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2283 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2284 under certain unusual conditions
2285 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2286 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2289 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2290 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2291 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2292 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2293 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2294 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2295 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2296 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2297 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2298 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2299 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2300 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2301 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2302 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2303 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2304 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2307 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2308 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2311 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2312 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2313 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2314 involving hard-linked directories
2315 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2316 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2317 character-special and block files
2320 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2321 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2322 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2323 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2324 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2325 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2326 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2327 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2328 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2330 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2331 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2332 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2333 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2334 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2335 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2336 specified on the command line.
2337 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2338 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2339 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2340 the first file untouched.
2341 * readlink: new program
2342 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2343 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2344 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2345 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2346 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2347 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2350 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2351 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2352 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2353 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2354 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2355 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2356 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2357 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2358 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2359 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2360 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2361 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2363 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2364 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2365 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2367 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2368 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2369 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2370 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2371 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2372 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2373 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2374 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2377 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2378 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2381 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2382 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2383 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2384 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2385 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2386 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2387 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2390 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2391 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2393 ========================================================================
2394 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2395 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2398 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2400 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2401 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2402 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2403 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2404 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2405 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2406 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2407 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2408 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2409 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2410 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2411 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2413 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2414 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2415 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2416 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2418 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2421 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2423 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2424 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2425 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2426 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2427 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2428 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2429 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2432 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2433 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2434 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2435 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2436 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2437 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2438 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2439 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2440 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2441 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2442 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2443 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2444 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2445 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2446 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2447 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2449 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2450 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2452 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2453 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2454 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2455 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2456 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2457 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2459 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2460 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2461 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2462 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2463 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2464 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2465 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2467 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2468 the source files in the following example:
2469 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2470 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2471 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2472 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2473 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2474 links between source files with --preserve=links
2475 * cp accepts new options:
2476 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2477 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2478 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2479 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2480 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2481 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2482 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2483 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2484 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2486 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2487 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2488 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2489 even though it's older than dest.
2490 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
2491 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
2492 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
2493 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
2494 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
2496 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
2497 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
2498 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
2499 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
2500 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
2501 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
2502 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
2504 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
2505 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
2506 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
2508 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
2509 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
2510 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
2511 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
2512 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
2513 This is the default.
2515 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
2516 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
2517 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
2518 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
2519 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
2521 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
2524 ========================================================================
2525 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
2526 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2529 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
2530 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
2532 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2533 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
2534 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
2535 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
2536 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
2538 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
2539 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
2540 that specifies a non-directory
2543 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
2544 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
2545 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
2546 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
2547 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2548 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
2549 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
2550 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2551 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
2552 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
2553 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
2554 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
2555 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
2556 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
2557 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
2558 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
2559 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
2560 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
2561 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
2562 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
2563 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
2564 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
2565 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
2566 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
2568 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
2569 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
2570 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
2572 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
2574 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
2575 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
2577 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
2578 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
2579 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
2580 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
2581 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
2583 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
2584 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
2585 required support; from Bruno Haible.
2586 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
2587 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
2589 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
2591 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
2592 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
2593 * still more portability fixes
2594 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
2595 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2597 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
2599 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
2601 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
2603 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
2604 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
2605 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
2606 there is any time remaining
2607 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
2609 ========================================================================
2610 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2611 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
2613 This package began as the union of the following:
2614 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
2616 ========================================================================
2618 Copyright (C) 2001-2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
2620 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
2621 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
2622 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
2623 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
2624 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
2625 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.