1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
8 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
9 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
11 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
12 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
13 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
14 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
15 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
17 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
18 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
20 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
21 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
23 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
24 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
25 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
27 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
28 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
29 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
30 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
32 ** Changes in behavior
34 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
35 when -v or -c specified.
39 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
40 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
41 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
43 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
44 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
45 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
46 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
47 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
48 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
49 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
51 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
52 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
53 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
57 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
60 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
61 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
63 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
64 For example `shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2` no longer exhausts memory.
66 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
68 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
72 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
73 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
76 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
80 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
81 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
83 ** Changes in behavior
85 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
86 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
87 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
88 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
89 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
90 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
92 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
93 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
94 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
98 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
101 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
105 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
106 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
107 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
109 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
110 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
111 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
113 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
114 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
115 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
117 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
118 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
120 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
121 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
123 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
124 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
126 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
127 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
131 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
132 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
133 processed portion thereof.
135 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
136 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
138 ** Changes in behavior
140 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
141 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
142 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
144 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
145 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
146 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
148 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
149 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
151 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
152 Use --preserve-context instead.
154 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
157 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
161 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
162 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
163 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
164 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
165 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
167 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
168 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
170 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
171 reject file names invalid for that file system.
173 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
174 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
178 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
179 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
180 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
181 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
182 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
183 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
184 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
185 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
187 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
188 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
189 the same number of fields are output for each line.
191 ** Changes in behavior
193 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
194 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
195 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
198 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
202 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
203 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
204 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
207 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
211 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
212 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
214 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
215 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
217 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
218 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
220 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
221 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
222 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
223 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
225 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
226 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
228 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
229 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
230 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
232 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
234 ** Changes in behavior
236 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
237 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
238 to the number of available processors.
242 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
245 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
249 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
250 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
251 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
252 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
254 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
255 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
256 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
258 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
259 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
261 ** Changes in behavior
263 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
264 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
266 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
267 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
268 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
269 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
270 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
271 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
273 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
274 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
275 the same way as the others.
278 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
282 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
283 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
284 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
286 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
287 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
289 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
290 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
291 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
293 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
294 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
296 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
297 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
299 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
300 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
301 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
303 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
304 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
305 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
306 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
310 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
311 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
313 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
316 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
317 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
319 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
321 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
322 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
323 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
325 ** Changes in behavior
327 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
328 rather than its aliased target.
330 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
331 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
332 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
334 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
335 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
336 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
337 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
338 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
339 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
340 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
341 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
343 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
345 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
347 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
348 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
351 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
352 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
353 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
354 control like taskset for example.
356 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
358 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
359 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
360 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
361 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
362 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
363 includes %C when context information is available.
365 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
366 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
367 rather than a file system attribute.
369 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
370 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
371 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
372 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
374 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
375 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
376 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
378 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
379 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
380 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
383 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
387 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
388 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
390 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
392 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
393 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
395 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
396 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
397 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
398 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
400 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
401 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
402 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
406 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
407 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
409 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
410 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
411 duration after the initial signal was sent.
413 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
414 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
415 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
416 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
417 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
418 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
419 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
420 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
421 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
423 ** Changes in behavior
425 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
426 sequence when it would be a no-op.
428 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
429 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
432 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
436 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
437 of available processors, which may not have been the case
438 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
439 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
443 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
444 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
446 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
447 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
448 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
449 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
451 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
452 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
453 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
456 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
460 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
461 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
462 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
464 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
465 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
466 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
468 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
469 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
471 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
472 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
473 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
474 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
476 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
477 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
478 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
480 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
481 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
482 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
483 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
485 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
486 renamed-aside and then recreated.
487 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
489 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
490 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
491 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
492 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
494 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
495 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
496 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
498 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
499 processes will not intersperse their output.
500 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
503 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
507 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
508 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
510 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
511 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
513 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
514 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
515 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
516 the presence of the empty string argument.
517 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
519 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
520 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
521 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
522 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
524 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
525 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
527 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
528 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
529 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
531 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
532 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
533 and with a malicious user on the same system
534 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
535 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
538 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
542 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
543 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
544 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
546 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
547 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
548 offending directory and all "contents."
550 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
551 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
552 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
554 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
555 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
556 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
558 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
559 processes will not intersperse their output.
560 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
561 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
563 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
564 output the name of the file to stdout.
565 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
567 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
568 call fails with errno == EACCES.
569 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
571 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
572 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
575 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
576 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
577 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
579 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
580 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
581 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
582 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
583 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
584 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
586 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
587 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
588 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
589 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
591 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
592 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
594 ** Changes in behavior
596 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
597 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
598 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
599 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
600 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
602 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
603 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
604 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
605 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
607 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
609 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
610 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
611 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
612 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
613 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
617 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
621 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
622 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
624 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
625 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
627 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
628 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
629 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
631 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
632 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
635 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
639 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
640 when the source file doesn't have write access.
641 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
643 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
644 to accommodate leap seconds.
645 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
647 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
648 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
649 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
651 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
653 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
654 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
655 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
657 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
658 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
659 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
660 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
661 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
665 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
666 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
667 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
668 directory or a symlink to a directory.
670 ** Changes in behavior
672 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
673 environment variable is set.
675 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
676 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
677 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
681 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
682 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
683 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
684 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
686 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
687 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
688 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
689 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
693 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
694 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
695 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
697 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
698 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
699 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
700 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
701 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
702 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
705 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
706 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
709 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
713 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
714 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
715 and libraries tested at configure time.
716 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
718 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
719 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
721 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
722 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
724 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
725 printing a summary to stderr.
726 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
728 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
729 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
730 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
732 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
733 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
735 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
736 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
737 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
738 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
740 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
741 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
742 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
743 which is relatively unusual.
744 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
746 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
747 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
748 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
749 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
750 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
751 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
752 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
756 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
757 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
758 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
759 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
760 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
764 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
765 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
767 ** Changes in behavior
769 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
770 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
771 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
772 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
773 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
776 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
780 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
781 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
783 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
784 before data copying has started.
786 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
787 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
789 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
790 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
791 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
792 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
794 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
795 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
796 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
797 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
799 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
804 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
805 for its standard streams.
807 ** Changes in behavior
809 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
810 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
811 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
812 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
813 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
814 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
816 ** Deprecated options
818 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
819 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
823 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
825 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
826 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
829 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
831 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
832 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
834 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
835 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
838 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
842 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
843 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
844 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
845 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
847 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
848 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
849 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
850 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
851 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
856 make check: two tests have been corrected
860 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
861 inherited from gnulib.
864 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
868 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
869 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
870 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
871 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
873 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
874 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
876 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
878 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
879 systems without xattr support.
881 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
882 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
883 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
885 ** Changes in behavior
887 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
888 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
889 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
890 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
892 ** Improved robustness
894 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
895 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
896 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
897 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
898 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
899 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
900 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
901 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
902 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
906 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
907 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
909 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
910 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
911 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
912 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
913 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
916 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
920 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
921 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
922 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
926 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
927 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
928 data was read, or on process exit.
929 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
931 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
932 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
933 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
934 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
936 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
937 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
938 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
939 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
941 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
942 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
944 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
945 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
947 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
948 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
949 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
951 ** Changes in behavior
953 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
954 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
955 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
957 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
958 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
960 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
961 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
962 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
965 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
969 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
971 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
972 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
973 install: Never copies xattrs
975 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
976 from overwriting any existing destination file
978 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
979 mode where this feature is available.
981 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
982 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
983 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
984 do not modify the destination at all.
986 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
988 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
992 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
993 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
995 cp uses much less memory in some situations
997 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
998 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1000 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1001 processing the first file name
1003 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1004 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1005 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1006 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1008 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1009 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1011 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1012 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1015 ** Changes in behavior
1017 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1018 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1020 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1021 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1022 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1024 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1025 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1027 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1029 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1030 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1031 is still marked with a '+'.
1034 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1038 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1039 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1043 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1044 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1045 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1046 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1047 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1048 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1050 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1051 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1053 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1054 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1056 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1058 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1059 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1060 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1062 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1063 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1065 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1066 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1067 used to factor large numbers.
1069 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1072 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1074 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1076 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1077 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1079 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1080 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1081 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1082 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1084 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1085 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1086 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1088 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1089 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1093 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1095 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1096 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1098 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1099 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1101 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1103 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1104 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1108 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1109 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1110 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1112 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1114 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1115 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1116 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1118 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1119 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1120 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1122 ** Changes in behavior
1124 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1125 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1128 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1132 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1134 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1135 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1136 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1138 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1139 with no USERNAME argument.
1141 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1142 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1143 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1145 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1146 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1147 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1148 number of fields for some inputs.
1150 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1151 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1153 ** Changes in behavior
1155 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1156 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1159 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1163 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1165 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1166 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1167 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1168 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1170 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1171 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1173 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1174 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1176 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1177 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1179 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1180 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1181 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1182 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1184 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1185 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1186 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1187 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1188 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1189 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1191 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1192 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1194 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1195 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1196 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1198 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1199 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1201 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1202 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1204 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1205 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1206 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1207 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1209 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1210 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1212 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1213 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1215 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1216 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1217 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1221 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1222 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1224 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1225 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1226 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1227 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1231 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1232 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1234 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1236 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1240 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1241 which have negative errno values.
1245 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1249 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1253 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1254 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1257 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1261 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1262 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1263 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1265 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1266 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1267 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1268 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1272 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1273 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1274 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1275 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1278 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1282 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1284 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1285 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1286 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1289 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1293 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1294 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1296 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1298 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1300 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1302 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1306 ** Changes in behavior
1308 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1309 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1311 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1312 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1314 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1315 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1316 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1320 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1321 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1322 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1323 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1324 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1325 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1326 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1327 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1328 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1329 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1330 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1332 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1333 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1334 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1337 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1340 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1341 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1342 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1344 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1345 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1346 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1349 ** New build options
1351 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1352 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1353 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1354 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1356 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1357 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1358 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1359 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1360 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1361 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1362 of "make check" fail.
1364 ** Remove deprecated options
1366 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1367 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1368 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1369 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1370 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1372 ** Improved robustness
1374 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1375 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1376 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1377 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1378 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1379 loss of the contents of a/f.
1381 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1382 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1386 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1387 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1388 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1390 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1391 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1392 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1393 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1395 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1396 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1397 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1398 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1399 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1400 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1401 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1402 destination is a symlink.
1404 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1406 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1407 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1409 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1410 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1412 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1414 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1415 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1417 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1418 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1420 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1423 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1424 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1426 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1427 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1429 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1430 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1431 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1432 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1434 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1435 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1436 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1438 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1439 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1440 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1442 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1443 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1444 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1445 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1447 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1448 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1449 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1451 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1452 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1454 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1455 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1457 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1459 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1460 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1461 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1463 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1464 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1466 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1467 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1469 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1470 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1472 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1473 [present in the original version]
1476 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1480 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1482 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1483 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1484 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1486 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1487 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1489 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1493 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1494 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1496 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1497 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1499 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1500 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1502 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1503 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1504 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1505 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1506 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1507 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1509 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1510 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1513 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1514 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1516 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1519 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1520 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1521 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1523 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1524 directory is unreadable.
1526 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1527 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1528 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1530 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1531 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1532 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1533 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1534 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1537 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1538 Before it would print nothing.
1540 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1542 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1543 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1544 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1545 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1546 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1547 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1548 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1549 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1551 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1555 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1556 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1557 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1559 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1560 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1561 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1562 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1565 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1569 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1570 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1571 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1572 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1573 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1574 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1575 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1577 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1578 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1579 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1580 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1581 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1582 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1583 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1584 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1586 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1587 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1588 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1591 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1595 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1596 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1598 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1599 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1600 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1602 ** Improved robustness
1604 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1605 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1606 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1609 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1613 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1614 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1615 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1616 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1617 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1619 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1623 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1626 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1630 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1631 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1632 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1633 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1635 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1636 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1638 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1639 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1640 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1643 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1645 ** Improved robustness
1647 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1648 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1650 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1651 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1652 or NFS-mounted partition.
1654 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1655 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1659 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1660 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1661 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1662 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1663 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1664 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1666 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1667 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1669 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1670 or neglect to report file removal.
1672 For the "groups" command:
1674 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1675 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1677 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1679 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1681 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1685 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1686 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1689 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1691 ** Changes in behavior
1693 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1694 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1695 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1696 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1698 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1699 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1700 a final `./' or `../' component.
1702 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1703 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1704 this only for pipes.
1706 ** Infrastructure changes
1708 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1709 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1710 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1711 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1715 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1716 name is "." or "..".
1718 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1719 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1720 dirent.d_type support.
1722 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1723 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1725 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1726 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1727 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1728 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1731 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1733 ** Changes in behavior
1735 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1739 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1740 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1744 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1745 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1746 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1748 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1749 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1751 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1752 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1754 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1756 ** Improved robustness
1758 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1759 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1760 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1762 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1763 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1766 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1767 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1769 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1770 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1772 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1773 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1775 ** Changes in behavior
1777 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1778 where the two are distinct.
1780 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1781 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1782 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1783 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1784 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1785 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1786 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1787 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1788 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1789 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1790 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1791 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1792 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1793 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1794 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1795 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1796 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1798 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1799 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1800 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1802 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1803 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1804 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1805 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1808 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1809 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1813 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1814 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1815 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1816 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1818 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1819 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1820 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1822 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1823 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1824 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1825 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1826 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1829 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1830 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1832 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1833 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1834 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1835 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1837 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1838 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1839 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1841 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1842 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1843 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1844 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1846 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1847 and sticky) with the -m option.
1849 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1850 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1851 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1852 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1853 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1855 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1856 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1858 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1862 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1863 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1864 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1865 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1867 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1869 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1871 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1872 silently ignoring one of them.
1874 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1875 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1876 containing this change was 5.92.
1878 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1879 automatically newline terminated.
1881 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1882 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1883 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1884 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1887 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1888 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1889 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1892 ** Scheduled for removal
1894 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1895 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1897 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1898 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1899 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1900 command to unlink a directory.
1902 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1903 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1904 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1905 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1909 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1910 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1911 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1912 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1913 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1914 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1918 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1919 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1921 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1923 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1924 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1925 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1927 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1928 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1931 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1932 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1934 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1935 list directories before files.
1937 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1938 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1939 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1940 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1943 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1945 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1947 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1948 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1949 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1951 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1952 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1956 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1957 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1958 usually printing nothing.
1960 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1962 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1963 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1964 them with hard-linked directories.
1966 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1967 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1968 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1970 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1971 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1972 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1974 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1977 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1978 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1980 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1981 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1983 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1984 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1986 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1987 all command-line arguments.
1989 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1991 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1993 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1994 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1996 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1998 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1999 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2000 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2001 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2002 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2004 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2005 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2007 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2008 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2009 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2010 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2012 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2014 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2018 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2019 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2021 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2022 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2024 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
2025 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2027 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2028 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
2030 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2031 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2033 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2035 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2036 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2037 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2040 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2042 ** Build-related bug fixes
2044 installing .mo files would fail
2047 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2051 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2053 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2056 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2060 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2061 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2065 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2067 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2068 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2070 ** Deprecated options
2072 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2073 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
2075 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2079 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2081 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2082 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2083 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2084 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2086 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2089 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2095 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2100 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2102 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2104 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2105 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2106 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2108 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2109 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2110 problematic usages. These include:
2112 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2113 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2114 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2115 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2116 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2117 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2118 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2119 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2120 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2122 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2123 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2125 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2126 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2127 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2128 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2130 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2131 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2132 between binary and text files.
2134 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2138 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2142 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2143 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2145 head tac tail tee tr
2146 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2148 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2149 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2151 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2152 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2153 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2155 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2157 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2159 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2160 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2161 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2165 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2167 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2168 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2170 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2171 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2172 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2176 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2177 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2181 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2182 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2183 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2187 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2188 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2192 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2194 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2196 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2200 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2201 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2202 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2204 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2205 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2206 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2207 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2208 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2210 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2214 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2215 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2216 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2218 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2220 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2221 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2222 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2223 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2225 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2227 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2228 rather than silently wrapping around.
2230 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2231 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2233 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2234 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2236 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2237 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2238 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2239 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2241 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2243 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2245 ** Improved robustness
2247 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2248 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2249 no matter how large the result.
2251 ** Improved portability
2253 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2254 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2256 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2258 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2259 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2260 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2262 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2263 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2267 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2268 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2270 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2272 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2273 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2274 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2275 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2277 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2278 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2280 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2281 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2282 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2284 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2286 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2287 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2289 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2290 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2292 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2294 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2295 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2297 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2298 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2300 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2301 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2302 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2304 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2306 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2308 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2312 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2314 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2315 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2316 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2318 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2319 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2321 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2322 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2323 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2325 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2326 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2328 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2329 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2330 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2331 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2333 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2334 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2336 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2337 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2338 the file system does not support it.
2340 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2342 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2343 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2345 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2347 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2348 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2350 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2351 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2352 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2353 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2355 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2356 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2359 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2360 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2361 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2362 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2364 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2365 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2366 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2367 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2369 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2370 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2372 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2374 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2375 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2376 reporting incorrect results.
2380 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2381 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2383 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2386 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2388 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2389 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2391 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2392 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2394 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2397 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2398 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2399 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2400 the file name does not look like a page range.
2402 printf has several changes:
2404 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2405 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2407 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2408 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2409 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2411 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2412 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2415 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2416 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2418 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2419 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2421 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2423 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2424 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2426 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2428 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2430 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2431 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2432 when first encountering the directory.
2436 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2437 output; POSIX requires this.
2439 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2440 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2442 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2444 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2445 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2447 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2448 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2450 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2451 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2452 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2453 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2454 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2455 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2456 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2458 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2459 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2460 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2462 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2463 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2465 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2467 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2469 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2470 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2471 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2472 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2474 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2478 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2479 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2480 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2481 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2482 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2484 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2485 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2486 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2488 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2489 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2491 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2492 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2494 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2495 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2496 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2497 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2498 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2500 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2501 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2503 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2504 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2506 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2508 nocreat do not create the output file
2509 excl fail if the output file already exists
2510 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2511 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2513 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2515 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2516 direct use direct I/O for data
2517 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2518 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2519 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2520 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2521 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2523 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2525 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2526 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2529 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2530 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2531 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2532 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2533 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2534 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2536 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2537 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2539 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2542 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2544 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2546 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2547 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2549 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2550 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2551 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2553 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2554 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2555 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2557 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2559 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2560 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2562 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2563 for compatibility with bash.
2565 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2567 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2568 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2569 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2570 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2572 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2573 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2575 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2576 ls supports TABSIZE.
2577 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2578 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2579 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2581 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2584 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2586 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2587 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2588 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2589 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2590 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2591 an offset, not as a file name.
2593 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2594 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2596 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2597 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2599 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2600 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2602 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2603 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2604 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2606 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2607 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2609 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2610 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2614 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2616 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2618 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2622 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2623 or more arguments between partitions.
2625 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2626 holes in the destination.
2628 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2629 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2630 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2631 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2632 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2633 terminates immediately.
2635 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2637 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2639 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2640 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2641 not the empty string.
2643 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2644 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2648 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2649 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2650 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2653 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2660 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2664 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2665 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2667 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2668 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2670 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2671 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2672 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2675 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2679 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2680 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2682 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2683 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2685 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2686 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2687 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2689 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2691 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2694 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2696 ** Configuration option
2698 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2699 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2703 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2704 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2708 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2709 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2710 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2713 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2714 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2715 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2716 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2717 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2718 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2719 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2722 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2726 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2727 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2728 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2730 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2731 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2733 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2735 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2736 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2737 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2738 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2740 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2742 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2743 not just the ones that reference directories
2745 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2746 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2748 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2749 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2750 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2752 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2753 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2754 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2755 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2756 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2757 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2759 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2764 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2765 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2767 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2769 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2771 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2773 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2774 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2776 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2777 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2779 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2781 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2785 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2787 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2789 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2790 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2791 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2792 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2793 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2795 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2796 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2798 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2799 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2801 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2802 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2804 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2805 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2806 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2810 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2811 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2812 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2813 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2814 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2815 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2816 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2817 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2818 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2819 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2820 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2821 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2822 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2823 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2825 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2827 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2828 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2830 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2832 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2834 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2835 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2837 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2839 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2840 without a trailing newline.
2842 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2843 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2845 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2848 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2852 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2854 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2856 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2857 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2858 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2859 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2861 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2863 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2864 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2865 be printed without leading spaces.
2867 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2868 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2873 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2874 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2875 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2877 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2879 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2880 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2882 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2883 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2885 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2886 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2888 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2890 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2892 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2894 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2895 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2897 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2899 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2901 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2902 byte offsets are specified.
2905 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2908 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2911 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2912 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2913 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2914 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2915 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2916 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2917 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2918 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2919 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2920 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2921 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2922 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2923 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2924 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2925 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2926 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2927 directory where M has write access.
2928 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2929 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2930 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2933 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2934 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2935 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2936 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2937 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2938 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2939 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2940 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2941 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2942 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2943 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2944 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2945 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2946 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2947 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2948 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2949 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2950 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2951 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2952 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2953 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2954 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2955 appeared one additional time.
2957 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2958 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2959 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2960 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2963 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2964 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2965 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2966 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2967 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2968 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2969 if there were more than 338.
2971 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2972 - false --help now exits nonzero
2975 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2976 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2977 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2978 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2981 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2982 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2983 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2984 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2985 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2988 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2989 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2990 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2991 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2992 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2993 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2994 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2997 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2998 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2999 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3000 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3001 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3002 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3004 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3005 under certain unusual conditions
3006 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3007 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3010 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3011 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3012 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3013 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3014 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3015 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
3016 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3017 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3018 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
3019 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
3020 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3021 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3022 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3023 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3024 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3025 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3028 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3029 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3032 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3033 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3034 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3035 involving hard-linked directories
3036 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3037 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
3038 character-special and block files
3041 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3042 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3043 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3044 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3045 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3046 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3047 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3048 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3049 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3051 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
3052 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
3053 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3054 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3055 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3056 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3057 specified on the command line.
3058 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3059 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
3060 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3061 the first file untouched.
3062 * readlink: new program
3063 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3064 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3065 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3066 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3067 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3068 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3071 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3072 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3073 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3074 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3075 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3076 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3077 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3078 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3079 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3080 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3081 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3082 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3084 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3085 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3086 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3088 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3089 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3090 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3091 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3092 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3093 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3094 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3095 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3098 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3099 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3102 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3103 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3104 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3105 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3106 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3107 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3108 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3111 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3112 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3114 ========================================================================
3115 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3116 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3119 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3121 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3122 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3123 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3124 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3125 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3126 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3127 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3128 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3129 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3130 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3131 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3132 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3134 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3135 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3136 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3137 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3139 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3142 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3144 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3145 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3146 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3147 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3148 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3149 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3150 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3153 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3154 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3155 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3156 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3157 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3158 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3159 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3160 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3161 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3162 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3163 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3164 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3165 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3166 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3167 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3168 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3170 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3171 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3173 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3174 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3175 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3176 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3177 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3178 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3180 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3181 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3182 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3183 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3184 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3185 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3186 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3188 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3189 the source files in the following example:
3190 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3191 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3192 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3193 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3194 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3195 links between source files with --preserve=links
3196 * cp accepts new options:
3197 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3198 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3199 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3200 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3201 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3202 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3203 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3204 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3205 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3207 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3208 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3209 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3210 even though it's older than dest.
3211 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3212 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3213 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3214 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3215 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3217 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3218 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3219 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3220 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3221 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3222 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3223 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3225 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3226 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3227 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3229 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3230 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3231 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3232 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3233 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3234 This is the default.
3236 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3237 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3238 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3239 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3240 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3242 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3245 ========================================================================
3246 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3247 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3250 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3251 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3253 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3254 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3255 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3256 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3257 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3259 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3260 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3261 that specifies a non-directory
3264 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3265 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3266 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3267 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3268 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3269 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3270 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3271 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3272 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3273 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3274 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3275 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3276 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3277 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3278 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3279 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3280 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3281 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3282 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3283 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3284 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3285 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3286 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3287 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3289 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3290 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3291 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3293 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3295 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3296 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3298 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3299 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3300 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3301 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3302 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3304 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3305 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3306 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3307 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3308 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3310 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3312 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3313 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3314 * still more portability fixes
3315 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3316 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3318 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3320 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3322 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3324 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3325 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3326 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3327 there is any time remaining
3328 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3330 ========================================================================
3331 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3332 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3334 This package began as the union of the following:
3335 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3337 ========================================================================
3339 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3341 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3342 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3343 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3344 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3345 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3346 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.