1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
8 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
9 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
10 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
11 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
13 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
14 reject file names invalid for that file system.
17 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
21 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
22 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
23 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
26 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
30 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
31 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
33 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
34 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
36 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
37 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
39 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
40 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
41 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
42 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
44 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
45 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
47 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
48 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
49 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
51 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
53 ** Changes in behavior
55 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
56 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
57 to the number of available processors.
61 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
64 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
68 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
69 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
70 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
71 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
73 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
74 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
75 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
77 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
78 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
80 ** Changes in behavior
82 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
83 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
85 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
86 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
87 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
88 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
89 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
90 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
92 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
93 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
94 the same way as the others.
97 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
101 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
102 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
103 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
105 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
106 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
108 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
109 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
110 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
112 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
113 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
115 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
116 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
118 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
119 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
120 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
122 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
123 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
124 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
125 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
129 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
130 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
132 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
135 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
136 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
138 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
140 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
141 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
142 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
144 ** Changes in behavior
146 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
147 rather than its aliased target.
149 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
150 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
151 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
153 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
154 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
155 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
156 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
157 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
158 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
159 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
160 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
162 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
164 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
166 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
167 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
170 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
171 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
172 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
173 control like taskset for example.
175 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
177 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
178 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
179 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
180 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
181 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
182 includes %C when context information is available.
184 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
185 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
186 rather than a file system attribute.
188 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
189 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
190 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
191 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
193 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
194 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
195 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
197 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
198 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
199 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
202 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
206 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
207 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
209 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
211 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
212 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
214 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
215 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
216 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
217 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
219 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
220 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
221 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
225 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
226 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
228 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
229 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
230 duration after the initial signal was sent.
232 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
233 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
234 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
235 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
236 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
237 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
238 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
239 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
240 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
242 ** Changes in behavior
244 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
245 sequence when it would be a no-op.
247 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
248 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
251 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
255 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
256 of available processors, which may not have been the case
257 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
258 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
262 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
263 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
265 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
266 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
267 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
268 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
270 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
271 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
272 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
275 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
279 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
280 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
281 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
283 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
284 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
285 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
287 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
288 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
290 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
291 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
292 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
293 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
295 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
296 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
297 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
299 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
300 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
301 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
302 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
304 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
305 renamed-aside and then recreated.
306 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
308 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
309 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
310 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
311 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
313 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
314 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
315 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
317 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
318 processes will not intersperse their output.
319 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
322 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
326 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
327 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
329 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
330 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
332 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
333 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
334 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
335 the presence of the empty string argument.
336 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
338 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
339 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
340 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
341 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
343 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
344 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
346 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
347 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
348 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
350 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
351 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
352 and with a malicious user on the same system
353 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
354 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
357 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
361 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
362 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
363 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
365 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
366 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
367 offending directory and all "contents."
369 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
370 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
371 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
373 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
374 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
375 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
377 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
378 processes will not intersperse their output.
379 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
380 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
382 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
383 output the name of the file to stdout.
384 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
386 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
387 call fails with errno == EACCES.
388 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
390 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
391 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
394 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
395 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
396 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
398 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
399 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
400 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
401 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
402 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
403 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
405 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
406 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
407 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
408 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
410 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
411 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
413 ** Changes in behavior
415 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
416 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
417 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
418 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
419 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
421 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
422 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
423 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
424 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
426 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
428 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
429 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
430 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
431 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
432 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
436 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
440 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
441 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
443 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
444 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
446 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
447 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
448 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
450 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
451 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
454 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
458 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
459 when the source file doesn't have write access.
460 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
462 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
463 to accommodate leap seconds.
464 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
466 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
467 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
468 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
470 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
472 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
473 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
474 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
476 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
477 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
478 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
479 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
480 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
484 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
485 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
486 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
487 directory or a symlink to a directory.
489 ** Changes in behavior
491 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
492 environment variable is set.
494 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
495 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
496 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
500 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
501 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
502 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
503 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
505 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
506 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
507 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
508 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
512 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
513 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
514 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
516 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
517 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
518 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
519 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
520 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
521 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
524 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
525 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
528 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
532 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
533 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
534 and libraries tested at configure time.
535 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
537 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
538 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
540 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
541 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
543 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
544 printing a summary to stderr.
545 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
547 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
548 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
549 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
551 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
552 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
554 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
555 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
556 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
557 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
559 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
560 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
561 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
562 which is relatively unusual.
563 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
565 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
566 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
567 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
568 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
569 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
570 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
571 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
575 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
576 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
577 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
578 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
579 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
583 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
584 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
586 ** Changes in behavior
588 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
589 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
590 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
591 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
592 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
595 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
599 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
600 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
602 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
603 before data copying has started.
605 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
606 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
608 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
609 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
610 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
611 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
613 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
614 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
615 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
616 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
618 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
623 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
624 for its standard streams.
626 ** Changes in behavior
628 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
629 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
630 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
631 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
632 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
633 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
635 ** Deprecated options
637 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
638 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
642 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
644 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
645 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
648 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
650 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
651 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
653 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
654 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
657 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
661 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
662 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
663 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
664 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
666 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
667 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
668 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
669 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
670 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
675 make check: two tests have been corrected
679 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
680 inherited from gnulib.
683 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
687 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
688 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
689 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
690 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
692 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
693 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
695 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
697 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
698 systems without xattr support.
700 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
701 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
702 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
704 ** Changes in behavior
706 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
707 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
708 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
709 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
711 ** Improved robustness
713 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
714 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
715 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
716 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
717 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
718 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
719 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
720 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
721 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
725 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
726 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
728 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
729 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
730 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
731 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
732 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
735 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
739 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
740 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
741 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
745 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
746 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
747 data was read, or on process exit.
748 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
750 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
751 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
752 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
753 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
755 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
756 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
757 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
758 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
760 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
761 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
763 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
764 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
766 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
767 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
768 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
770 ** Changes in behavior
772 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
773 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
774 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
776 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
777 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
779 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
780 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
781 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
784 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
788 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
790 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
791 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
792 install: Never copies xattrs
794 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
795 from overwriting any existing destination file
797 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
798 mode where this feature is available.
800 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
801 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
802 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
803 do not modify the destination at all.
805 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
807 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
811 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
812 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
814 cp uses much less memory in some situations
816 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
817 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
819 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
820 processing the first file name
822 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
823 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
824 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
825 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
827 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
828 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
830 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
831 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
834 ** Changes in behavior
836 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
837 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
839 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
840 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
841 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
843 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
844 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
846 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
848 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
849 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
850 is still marked with a '+'.
853 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
857 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
858 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
862 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
863 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
864 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
865 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
866 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
867 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
869 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
870 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
872 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
873 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
875 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
877 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
878 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
879 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
881 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
882 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
884 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
885 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
886 used to factor large numbers.
888 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
891 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
893 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
895 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
896 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
898 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
899 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
900 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
901 maximum command-line (argv) length.
903 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
904 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
905 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
907 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
908 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
912 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
914 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
915 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
917 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
918 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
920 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
922 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
923 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
927 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
928 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
929 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
931 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
933 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
934 no matter how many files are in a given directory
936 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
937 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
938 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
940 ** Changes in behavior
942 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
943 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
946 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
950 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
952 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
953 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
954 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
956 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
957 with no USERNAME argument.
959 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
960 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
961 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
963 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
964 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
965 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
966 number of fields for some inputs.
968 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
969 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
971 ** Changes in behavior
973 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
974 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
977 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
981 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
983 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
984 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
985 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
986 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
988 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
989 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
991 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
992 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
994 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
995 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
997 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
998 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
999 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1000 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1002 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1003 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1004 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1005 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1006 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1007 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1009 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1010 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1012 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1013 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1014 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1016 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1017 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1019 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1020 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1022 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1023 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1024 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1025 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1027 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1028 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1030 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1031 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1033 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1034 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1035 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1039 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1040 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1042 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1043 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1044 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1045 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1049 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1050 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1052 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1054 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1058 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1059 which have negative errno values.
1063 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1067 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1071 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1072 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1075 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1079 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1080 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1081 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1083 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1084 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1085 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1086 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1090 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1091 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1092 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1093 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1096 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1100 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1102 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1103 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1104 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1107 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1111 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1112 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1114 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1116 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1118 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1120 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1124 ** Changes in behavior
1126 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1127 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1129 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1130 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1132 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1133 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1134 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1138 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1139 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1140 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1141 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1142 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1143 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1144 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1145 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1146 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1147 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1148 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1150 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1151 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1152 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1155 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1158 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1159 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1160 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1162 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1163 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1164 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1167 ** New build options
1169 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1170 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1171 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1172 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1174 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1175 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1176 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1177 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1178 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1179 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1180 of "make check" fail.
1182 ** Remove deprecated options
1184 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1185 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1186 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1187 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1188 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1190 ** Improved robustness
1192 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1193 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1194 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1195 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1196 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1197 loss of the contents of a/f.
1199 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1200 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1204 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1205 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1206 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1208 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1209 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1210 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1211 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1213 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1214 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1215 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1216 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1217 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1218 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1219 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1220 destination is a symlink.
1222 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1224 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1225 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1227 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1228 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1230 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1232 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1233 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1235 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1236 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1238 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1241 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1242 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1244 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1245 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1247 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1248 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1249 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1250 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1252 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1253 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1254 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1256 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1257 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1258 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1260 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1261 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1262 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1263 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1265 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1266 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1267 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1269 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1270 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1272 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1273 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1275 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1277 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1278 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1279 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1281 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1282 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1284 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1285 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1287 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1288 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1290 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1291 [present in the original version]
1294 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1298 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1300 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1301 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1302 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1304 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1305 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1307 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1311 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1312 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1314 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1315 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1317 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1318 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1320 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1321 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1322 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1323 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1324 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1325 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1327 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1328 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1331 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1332 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1334 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1337 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1338 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1339 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1341 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1342 directory is unreadable.
1344 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1345 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1346 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1348 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1349 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1350 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1351 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1352 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1355 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1356 Before it would print nothing.
1358 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1360 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1361 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1362 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1363 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1364 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1365 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1366 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1367 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1369 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1373 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1374 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1375 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1377 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1378 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1379 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1380 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1383 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1387 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1388 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1389 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1390 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1391 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1392 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1393 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1395 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1396 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1397 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1398 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1399 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1400 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1401 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1402 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1404 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1405 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1406 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1409 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1413 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1414 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1416 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1417 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1418 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1420 ** Improved robustness
1422 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1423 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1424 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1427 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1431 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1432 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1433 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1434 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1435 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1437 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1441 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1444 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1448 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1449 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1450 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1451 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1453 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1454 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1456 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1457 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1458 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1461 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1463 ** Improved robustness
1465 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1466 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1468 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1469 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1470 or NFS-mounted partition.
1472 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1473 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1477 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1478 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1479 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1480 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1481 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1482 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1484 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1485 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1487 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1488 or neglect to report file removal.
1490 For the "groups" command:
1492 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1493 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1495 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1497 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1499 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1503 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1504 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1507 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1509 ** Changes in behavior
1511 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1512 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1513 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1514 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1516 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1517 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1518 a final `./' or `../' component.
1520 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1521 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1522 this only for pipes.
1524 ** Infrastructure changes
1526 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1527 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1528 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1529 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1533 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1534 name is "." or "..".
1536 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1537 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1538 dirent.d_type support.
1540 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1541 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1543 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1544 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1545 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1546 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1549 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1551 ** Changes in behavior
1553 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1557 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1558 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1562 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1563 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1564 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1566 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1567 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1569 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1570 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1572 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1574 ** Improved robustness
1576 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1577 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1578 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1580 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1581 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1584 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1585 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1587 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1588 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1590 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1591 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1593 ** Changes in behavior
1595 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1596 where the two are distinct.
1598 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1599 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1600 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1601 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1602 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1603 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1604 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1605 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1606 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1607 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1608 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1609 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1610 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1611 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1612 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1613 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1614 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1616 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1617 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1618 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1620 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1621 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1622 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1623 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1626 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1627 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1631 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1632 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1633 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1634 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1636 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1637 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1638 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1640 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1641 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1642 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1643 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1644 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1647 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1648 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1650 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1651 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1652 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1653 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1655 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1656 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1657 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1659 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1660 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1661 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1662 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1664 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1665 and sticky) with the -m option.
1667 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1668 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1669 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1670 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1671 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1673 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1674 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1676 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1680 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1681 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1682 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1683 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1685 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1687 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1689 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1690 silently ignoring one of them.
1692 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1693 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1694 containing this change was 5.92.
1696 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1697 automatically newline terminated.
1699 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1700 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1701 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1702 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1705 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1706 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1707 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1710 ** Scheduled for removal
1712 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1713 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1715 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1716 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1717 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1718 command to unlink a directory.
1720 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1721 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1722 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1723 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1727 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1728 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1729 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1730 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1731 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1732 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1736 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1737 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1739 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1741 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1742 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1743 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1745 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1746 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1749 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1750 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1752 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1753 list directories before files.
1755 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1756 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1757 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1758 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1761 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1763 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1765 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1766 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1767 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1769 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1770 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1774 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1775 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1776 usually printing nothing.
1778 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1780 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1781 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1782 them with hard-linked directories.
1784 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1785 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1786 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1788 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1789 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1790 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1792 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1795 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1796 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1798 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1799 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1801 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1802 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1804 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1805 all command-line arguments.
1807 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1809 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1811 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1812 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1814 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1816 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1817 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1818 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1819 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1820 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1822 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1823 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1825 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1826 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1827 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1828 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1830 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1832 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1836 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1837 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1839 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1840 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1842 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1843 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1845 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1846 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1848 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1849 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1851 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1853 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1854 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1855 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1858 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1860 ** Build-related bug fixes
1862 installing .mo files would fail
1865 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1869 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1871 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1874 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1878 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1879 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1883 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1885 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1886 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1888 ** Deprecated options
1890 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1891 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1893 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1897 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1899 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1900 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1901 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1902 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1904 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1907 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1913 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1918 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1920 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1922 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1923 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1924 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1926 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1927 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1928 problematic usages. These include:
1930 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1931 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1932 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1933 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1934 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1935 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1936 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1937 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1938 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1940 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1941 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1943 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1944 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1945 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1946 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1948 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1949 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1950 between binary and text files.
1952 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1956 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1960 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1961 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1963 head tac tail tee tr
1964 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1966 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1967 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1969 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1970 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1971 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1973 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1975 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1977 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1978 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1979 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1983 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1985 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1986 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1988 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1989 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1990 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1994 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1995 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1999 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2000 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2001 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2005 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2006 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2010 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2012 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2014 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2018 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2019 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2020 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2022 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2023 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2024 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2025 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2026 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2028 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2032 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2033 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2034 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2036 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2038 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2039 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2040 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2041 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2043 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2045 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2046 rather than silently wrapping around.
2048 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2049 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2051 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2052 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2054 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2055 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2056 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2057 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2059 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2061 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2063 ** Improved robustness
2065 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2066 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2067 no matter how large the result.
2069 ** Improved portability
2071 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2072 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2074 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2076 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2077 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2078 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2080 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2081 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2085 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2086 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2088 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2090 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2091 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2092 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2093 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2095 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2096 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2098 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2099 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2100 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2102 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2104 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2105 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2107 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2108 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2110 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2112 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2113 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2115 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2116 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2118 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2119 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2120 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2122 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2124 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2126 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2130 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2132 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2133 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2134 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2136 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2137 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2139 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2140 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2141 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2143 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2144 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2146 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2147 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2148 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2149 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2151 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2152 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2154 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2155 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2156 the file system does not support it.
2158 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2160 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2161 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2163 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2165 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2166 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2168 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2169 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2170 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2171 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2173 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2174 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2177 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2178 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2179 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2180 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2182 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2183 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2184 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2185 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2187 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2188 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2190 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2192 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2193 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2194 reporting incorrect results.
2198 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2199 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2201 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2204 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2206 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2207 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2209 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2210 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2212 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2215 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2216 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2217 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2218 the file name does not look like a page range.
2220 printf has several changes:
2222 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2223 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2225 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2226 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2227 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2229 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2230 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2233 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2234 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2236 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2237 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2239 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2241 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2242 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2244 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2246 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2248 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2249 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2250 when first encountering the directory.
2254 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2255 output; POSIX requires this.
2257 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2258 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2260 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2262 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2263 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2265 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2266 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2268 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2269 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2270 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2271 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2272 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2273 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2274 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2276 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2277 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2278 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2280 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2281 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2283 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2285 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2287 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2288 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2289 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2290 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2292 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2296 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2297 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2298 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2299 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2300 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2302 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2303 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2304 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2306 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2307 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2309 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2310 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2312 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2313 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2314 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2315 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2316 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2318 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2319 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2321 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2322 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2324 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2326 nocreat do not create the output file
2327 excl fail if the output file already exists
2328 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2329 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2331 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2333 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2334 direct use direct I/O for data
2335 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2336 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2337 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2338 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2339 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2341 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2343 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2344 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2347 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2348 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2349 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2350 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2351 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2352 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2354 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2355 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2357 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2360 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2362 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2364 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2365 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2367 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2368 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2369 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2371 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2372 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2373 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2375 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2377 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2378 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2380 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2381 for compatibility with bash.
2383 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2385 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2386 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2387 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2388 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2390 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2391 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2393 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2394 ls supports TABSIZE.
2395 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2396 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2397 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2399 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2402 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2404 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2405 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2406 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2407 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2408 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2409 an offset, not as a file name.
2411 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2412 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2414 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2415 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2417 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2418 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2420 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2421 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2422 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2424 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2425 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2427 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2428 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2432 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2434 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2436 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2440 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2441 or more arguments between partitions.
2443 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2444 holes in the destination.
2446 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2447 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2448 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2449 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2450 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2451 terminates immediately.
2453 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2455 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2457 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2458 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2459 not the empty string.
2461 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2462 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2466 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2467 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2468 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2471 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2478 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2482 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2483 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2485 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2486 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2488 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2489 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2490 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2493 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2497 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2498 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2500 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2501 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2503 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2504 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2505 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2507 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2509 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2512 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2514 ** Configuration option
2516 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2517 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2521 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2522 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2526 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2527 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2528 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2531 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2532 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2533 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2534 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2535 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2536 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2537 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2540 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2544 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2545 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2546 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2548 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2549 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2551 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2553 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2554 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2555 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2556 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2558 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2560 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2561 not just the ones that reference directories
2563 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2564 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2566 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2567 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2568 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2570 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2571 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2572 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2573 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2574 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2575 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2577 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2582 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2583 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2585 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2587 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2589 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2591 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2592 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2594 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2595 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2597 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2599 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2603 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2605 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2607 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2608 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2609 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2610 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2611 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2613 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2614 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2616 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2617 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2619 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2620 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2622 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2623 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2624 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2628 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2629 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2630 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2631 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2632 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2633 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2634 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2635 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2636 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2637 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2638 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2639 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2640 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2641 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2643 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2645 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2646 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2648 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2650 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2652 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2653 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2655 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2657 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2658 without a trailing newline.
2660 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2661 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2663 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2666 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2670 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2672 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2674 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2675 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2676 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2677 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2679 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2681 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2682 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2683 be printed without leading spaces.
2685 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2686 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2691 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2692 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2693 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2695 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2697 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2698 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2700 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2701 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2703 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2704 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2706 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2708 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2710 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2712 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2713 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2715 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2717 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2719 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2720 byte offsets are specified.
2723 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2726 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2729 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2730 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2731 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2732 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2733 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2734 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2735 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2736 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2737 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2738 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2739 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2740 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2741 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2742 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2743 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2744 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2745 directory where M has write access.
2746 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2747 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2748 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2751 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2752 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2753 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2754 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2755 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2756 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2757 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2758 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2759 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2760 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2761 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2762 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2763 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2764 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2765 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2766 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2767 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2768 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2769 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2770 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2771 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2772 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2773 appeared one additional time.
2775 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2776 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2777 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2778 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2781 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2782 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2783 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2784 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2785 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2786 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2787 if there were more than 338.
2789 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2790 - false --help now exits nonzero
2793 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2794 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2795 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2796 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2799 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2800 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2801 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2802 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2803 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2806 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2807 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2808 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2809 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2810 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2811 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2812 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2815 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2816 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2817 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2818 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2819 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2820 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2822 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2823 under certain unusual conditions
2824 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2825 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2828 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2829 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2830 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2831 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2832 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2833 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2834 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2835 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2836 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2837 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2838 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2839 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2840 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2841 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2842 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2843 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2846 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2847 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2850 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2851 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2852 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2853 involving hard-linked directories
2854 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2855 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2856 character-special and block files
2859 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2860 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2861 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2862 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2863 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2864 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2865 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2866 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2867 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2869 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2870 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2871 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2872 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2873 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2874 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2875 specified on the command line.
2876 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2877 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2878 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2879 the first file untouched.
2880 * readlink: new program
2881 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2882 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2883 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2884 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2885 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2886 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2889 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2890 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2891 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2892 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2893 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2894 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2895 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2896 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2897 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2898 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2899 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2900 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2902 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2903 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2904 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2906 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2907 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2908 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2909 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2910 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2911 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2912 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2913 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2916 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2917 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2920 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2921 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2922 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2923 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2924 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2925 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2926 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2929 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2930 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2932 ========================================================================
2933 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2934 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2937 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2939 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2940 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2941 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2942 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2943 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2944 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2945 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2946 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2947 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2948 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2949 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2950 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2952 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2953 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2954 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2955 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2957 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2960 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2962 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2963 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2964 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2965 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2966 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2967 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2968 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2971 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2972 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2973 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2974 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2975 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2976 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2977 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2978 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2979 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2980 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2981 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2982 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2983 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2984 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2985 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2986 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2988 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2989 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2991 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2992 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2993 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2994 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2995 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2996 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2998 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2999 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3000 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3001 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3002 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3003 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3004 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3006 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3007 the source files in the following example:
3008 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3009 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3010 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3011 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3012 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3013 links between source files with --preserve=links
3014 * cp accepts new options:
3015 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3016 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3017 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3018 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3019 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3020 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3021 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3022 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3023 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3025 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3026 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3027 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3028 even though it's older than dest.
3029 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3030 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3031 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3032 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3033 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3035 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3036 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3037 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3038 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3039 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3040 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3041 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3043 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3044 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3045 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3047 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3048 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3049 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3050 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3051 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3052 This is the default.
3054 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3055 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3056 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3057 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3058 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3060 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3063 ========================================================================
3064 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3065 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3068 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3069 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3071 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3072 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3073 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3074 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3075 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3077 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3078 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3079 that specifies a non-directory
3082 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3083 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3084 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3085 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3086 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3087 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3088 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3089 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3090 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3091 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3092 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3093 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3094 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3095 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3096 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3097 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3098 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3099 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3100 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3101 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3102 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3103 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3104 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3105 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3107 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3108 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3109 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3111 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3113 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3114 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3116 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3117 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3118 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3119 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3120 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3122 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3123 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3124 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3125 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3126 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3128 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3130 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3131 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3132 * still more portability fixes
3133 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3134 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3136 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3138 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3140 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3142 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3143 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3144 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3145 there is any time remaining
3146 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3148 ========================================================================
3149 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3150 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3152 This package began as the union of the following:
3153 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3155 ========================================================================
3157 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3159 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3160 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3161 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3162 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3163 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3164 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.