1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
8 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
9 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
11 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
12 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
14 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
15 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
17 ** Changes in behavior
19 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
20 when -v or -c specified.
24 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
25 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
26 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
27 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
28 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
29 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
30 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
34 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
35 For example `shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2` no longer exhausts memory.
37 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
42 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
43 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
46 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
50 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
51 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
53 ** Changes in behavior
55 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
56 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
57 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
58 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
59 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
60 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
62 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
63 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
64 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
68 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
71 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
75 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
76 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
77 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
79 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
80 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
81 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
83 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
84 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
85 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
87 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
88 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
90 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
91 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
93 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
94 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
96 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
97 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
101 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
102 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
103 processed portion thereof.
105 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
106 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
108 ** Changes in behavior
110 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
111 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
112 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
114 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
115 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
116 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
118 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
119 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
121 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
122 Use --preserve-context instead.
124 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
127 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
131 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
132 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
133 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
134 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
135 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
137 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
138 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
140 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
141 reject file names invalid for that file system.
143 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
144 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
148 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
149 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
150 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
151 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
152 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
153 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
154 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
155 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
157 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
158 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
159 the same number of fields are output for each line.
161 ** Changes in behavior
163 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
164 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
165 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
168 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
172 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
173 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
174 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
177 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
181 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
182 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
184 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
185 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
187 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
188 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
190 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
191 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
192 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
193 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
195 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
196 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
198 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
199 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
200 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
202 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
204 ** Changes in behavior
206 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
207 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
208 to the number of available processors.
212 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
215 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
219 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
220 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
221 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
222 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
224 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
225 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
226 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
228 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
229 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
231 ** Changes in behavior
233 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
234 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
236 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
237 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
238 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
239 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
240 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
241 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
243 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
244 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
245 the same way as the others.
248 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
252 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
253 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
254 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
256 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
257 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
259 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
260 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
261 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
263 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
264 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
266 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
267 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
269 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
270 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
271 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
273 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
274 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
275 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
276 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
280 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
281 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
283 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
286 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
287 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
289 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
291 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
292 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
293 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
295 ** Changes in behavior
297 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
298 rather than its aliased target.
300 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
301 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
302 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
304 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
305 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
306 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
307 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
308 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
309 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
310 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
311 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
313 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
315 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
317 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
318 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
321 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
322 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
323 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
324 control like taskset for example.
326 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
328 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
329 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
330 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
331 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
332 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
333 includes %C when context information is available.
335 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
336 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
337 rather than a file system attribute.
339 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
340 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
341 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
342 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
344 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
345 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
346 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
348 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
349 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
350 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
353 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
357 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
358 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
360 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
362 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
363 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
365 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
366 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
367 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
368 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
370 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
371 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
372 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
376 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
377 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
379 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
380 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
381 duration after the initial signal was sent.
383 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
384 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
385 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
386 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
387 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
388 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
389 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
390 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
391 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
393 ** Changes in behavior
395 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
396 sequence when it would be a no-op.
398 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
399 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
402 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
406 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
407 of available processors, which may not have been the case
408 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
409 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
413 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
414 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
416 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
417 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
418 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
419 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
421 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
422 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
423 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
426 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
430 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
431 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
432 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
434 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
435 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
436 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
438 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
439 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
441 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
442 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
443 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
444 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
446 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
447 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
448 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
450 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
451 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
452 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
453 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
455 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
456 renamed-aside and then recreated.
457 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
459 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
460 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
461 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
462 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
464 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
465 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
466 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
468 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
469 processes will not intersperse their output.
470 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
473 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
477 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
478 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
480 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
481 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
483 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
484 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
485 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
486 the presence of the empty string argument.
487 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
489 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
490 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
491 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
492 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
494 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
495 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
497 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
498 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
499 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
501 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
502 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
503 and with a malicious user on the same system
504 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
505 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
508 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
512 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
513 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
514 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
516 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
517 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
518 offending directory and all "contents."
520 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
521 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
522 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
524 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
525 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
526 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
528 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
529 processes will not intersperse their output.
530 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
531 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
533 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
534 output the name of the file to stdout.
535 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
537 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
538 call fails with errno == EACCES.
539 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
541 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
542 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
545 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
546 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
547 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
549 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
550 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
551 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
552 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
553 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
554 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
556 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
557 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
558 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
559 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
561 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
562 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
564 ** Changes in behavior
566 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
567 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
568 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
569 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
570 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
572 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
573 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
574 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
575 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
577 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
579 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
580 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
581 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
582 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
583 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
587 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
591 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
592 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
594 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
595 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
597 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
598 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
599 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
601 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
602 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
605 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
609 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
610 when the source file doesn't have write access.
611 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
613 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
614 to accommodate leap seconds.
615 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
617 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
618 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
619 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
621 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
623 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
624 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
625 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
627 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
628 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
629 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
630 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
631 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
635 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
636 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
637 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
638 directory or a symlink to a directory.
640 ** Changes in behavior
642 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
643 environment variable is set.
645 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
646 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
647 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
651 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
652 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
653 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
654 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
656 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
657 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
658 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
659 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
663 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
664 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
665 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
667 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
668 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
669 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
670 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
671 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
672 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
675 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
676 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
679 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
683 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
684 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
685 and libraries tested at configure time.
686 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
688 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
689 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
691 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
692 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
694 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
695 printing a summary to stderr.
696 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
698 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
699 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
700 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
702 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
703 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
705 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
706 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
707 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
708 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
710 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
711 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
712 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
713 which is relatively unusual.
714 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
716 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
717 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
718 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
719 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
720 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
721 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
722 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
726 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
727 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
728 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
729 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
730 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
734 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
735 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
737 ** Changes in behavior
739 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
740 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
741 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
742 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
743 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
746 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
750 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
751 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
753 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
754 before data copying has started.
756 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
757 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
759 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
760 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
761 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
762 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
764 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
765 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
766 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
767 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
769 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
774 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
775 for its standard streams.
777 ** Changes in behavior
779 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
780 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
781 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
782 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
783 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
784 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
786 ** Deprecated options
788 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
789 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
793 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
795 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
796 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
799 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
801 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
802 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
804 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
805 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
808 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
812 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
813 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
814 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
815 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
817 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
818 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
819 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
820 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
821 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
826 make check: two tests have been corrected
830 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
831 inherited from gnulib.
834 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
838 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
839 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
840 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
841 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
843 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
844 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
846 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
848 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
849 systems without xattr support.
851 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
852 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
853 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
855 ** Changes in behavior
857 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
858 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
859 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
860 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
862 ** Improved robustness
864 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
865 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
866 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
867 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
868 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
869 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
870 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
871 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
872 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
876 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
877 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
879 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
880 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
881 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
882 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
883 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
886 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
890 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
891 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
892 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
896 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
897 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
898 data was read, or on process exit.
899 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
901 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
902 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
903 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
904 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
906 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
907 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
908 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
909 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
911 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
912 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
914 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
915 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
917 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
918 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
919 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
921 ** Changes in behavior
923 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
924 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
925 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
927 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
928 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
930 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
931 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
932 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
935 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
939 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
941 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
942 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
943 install: Never copies xattrs
945 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
946 from overwriting any existing destination file
948 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
949 mode where this feature is available.
951 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
952 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
953 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
954 do not modify the destination at all.
956 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
958 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
962 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
963 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
965 cp uses much less memory in some situations
967 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
968 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
970 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
971 processing the first file name
973 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
974 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
975 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
976 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
978 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
979 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
981 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
982 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
985 ** Changes in behavior
987 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
988 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
990 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
991 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
992 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
994 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
995 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
997 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
999 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1000 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1001 is still marked with a '+'.
1004 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1008 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1009 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1013 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1014 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1015 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1016 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1017 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1018 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1020 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1021 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1023 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1024 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1026 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1028 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1029 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1030 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1032 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1033 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1035 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1036 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1037 used to factor large numbers.
1039 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1042 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1044 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1046 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1047 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1049 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1050 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1051 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1052 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1054 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1055 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1056 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1058 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1059 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1063 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1065 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1066 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1068 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1069 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1071 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1073 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1074 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1078 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1079 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1080 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1082 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1084 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1085 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1086 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1088 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1089 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1090 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1092 ** Changes in behavior
1094 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1095 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1098 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1102 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1104 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1105 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1106 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1108 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1109 with no USERNAME argument.
1111 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1112 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1113 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1115 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1116 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1117 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1118 number of fields for some inputs.
1120 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1121 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1123 ** Changes in behavior
1125 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1126 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1129 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1133 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1135 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1136 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1137 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1138 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1140 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1141 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1143 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1144 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1146 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1147 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1149 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1150 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1151 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1152 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1154 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1155 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1156 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1157 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1158 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1159 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1161 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1162 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1164 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1165 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1166 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1168 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1169 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1171 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1172 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1174 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1175 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1176 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1177 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1179 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1180 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1182 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1183 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1185 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1186 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1187 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1191 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1192 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1194 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1195 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1196 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1197 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1201 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1202 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1204 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1206 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1210 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1211 which have negative errno values.
1215 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1219 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1223 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1224 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1227 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1231 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1232 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1233 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1235 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1236 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1237 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1238 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1242 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1243 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1244 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1245 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1248 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1252 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1254 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1255 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1256 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1259 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1263 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1264 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1266 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1268 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1270 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1272 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1276 ** Changes in behavior
1278 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1279 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1281 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1282 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1284 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1285 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1286 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1290 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1291 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1292 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1293 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1294 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1295 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1296 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1297 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1298 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1299 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1300 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1302 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1303 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1304 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1307 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1310 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1311 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1312 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1314 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1315 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1316 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1319 ** New build options
1321 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1322 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1323 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1324 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1326 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1327 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1328 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1329 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1330 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1331 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1332 of "make check" fail.
1334 ** Remove deprecated options
1336 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1337 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1338 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1339 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1340 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1342 ** Improved robustness
1344 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1345 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1346 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1347 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1348 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1349 loss of the contents of a/f.
1351 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1352 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1356 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1357 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1358 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1360 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1361 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1362 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1363 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1365 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1366 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1367 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1368 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1369 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1370 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1371 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1372 destination is a symlink.
1374 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1376 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1377 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1379 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1380 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1382 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1384 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1385 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1387 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1388 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1390 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1393 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1394 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1396 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1397 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1399 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1400 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1401 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1402 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1404 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1405 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1406 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1408 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1409 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1410 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1412 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1413 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1414 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1415 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1417 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1418 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1419 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1421 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1422 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1424 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1425 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1427 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1429 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1430 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1431 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1433 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1434 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1436 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1437 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1439 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1440 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1442 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1443 [present in the original version]
1446 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1450 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1452 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1453 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1454 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1456 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1457 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1459 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1463 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1464 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1466 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1467 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1469 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1470 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1472 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1473 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1474 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1475 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1476 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1477 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1479 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1480 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1483 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1484 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1486 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1489 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1490 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1491 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1493 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1494 directory is unreadable.
1496 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1497 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1498 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1500 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1501 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1502 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1503 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1504 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1507 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1508 Before it would print nothing.
1510 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1512 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1513 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1514 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1515 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1516 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1517 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1518 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1519 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1521 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1525 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1526 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1527 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1529 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1530 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1531 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1532 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1535 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1539 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1540 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1541 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1542 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1543 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1544 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1545 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1547 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1548 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1549 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1550 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1551 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1552 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1553 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1554 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1556 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1557 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1558 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1561 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1565 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1566 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1568 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1569 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1570 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1572 ** Improved robustness
1574 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1575 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1576 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1579 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1583 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1584 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1585 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1586 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1587 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1589 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1593 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1596 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1600 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1601 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1602 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1603 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1605 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1606 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1608 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1609 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1610 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1613 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1615 ** Improved robustness
1617 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1618 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1620 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1621 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1622 or NFS-mounted partition.
1624 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1625 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1629 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1630 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1631 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1632 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1633 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1634 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1636 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1637 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1639 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1640 or neglect to report file removal.
1642 For the "groups" command:
1644 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1645 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1647 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1649 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1651 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1655 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1656 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1659 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1661 ** Changes in behavior
1663 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1664 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1665 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1666 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1668 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1669 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1670 a final `./' or `../' component.
1672 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1673 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1674 this only for pipes.
1676 ** Infrastructure changes
1678 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1679 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1680 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1681 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1685 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1686 name is "." or "..".
1688 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1689 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1690 dirent.d_type support.
1692 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1693 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1695 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1696 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1697 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1698 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1701 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1703 ** Changes in behavior
1705 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1709 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1710 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1714 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1715 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1716 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1718 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1719 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1721 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1722 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1724 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1726 ** Improved robustness
1728 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1729 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1730 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1732 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1733 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1736 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1737 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1739 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1740 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1742 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1743 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1745 ** Changes in behavior
1747 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1748 where the two are distinct.
1750 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1751 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1752 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1753 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1754 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1755 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1756 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1757 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1758 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1759 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1760 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1761 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1762 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1763 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1764 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1765 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1766 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1768 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1769 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1770 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1772 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1773 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1774 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1775 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1778 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1779 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1783 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1784 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1785 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1786 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1788 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1789 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1790 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1792 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1793 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1794 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1795 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1796 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1799 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1800 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1802 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1803 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1804 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1805 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1807 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1808 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1809 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1811 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1812 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1813 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1814 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1816 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1817 and sticky) with the -m option.
1819 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1820 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1821 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1822 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1823 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1825 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1826 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1828 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1832 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1833 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1834 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1835 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1837 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1839 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1841 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1842 silently ignoring one of them.
1844 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1845 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1846 containing this change was 5.92.
1848 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1849 automatically newline terminated.
1851 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1852 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1853 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1854 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1857 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1858 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1859 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1862 ** Scheduled for removal
1864 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1865 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1867 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1868 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1869 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1870 command to unlink a directory.
1872 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1873 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1874 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1875 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1879 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1880 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1881 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1882 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1883 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1884 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1888 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1889 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1891 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1893 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1894 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1895 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1897 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1898 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1901 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1902 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1904 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1905 list directories before files.
1907 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1908 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1909 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1910 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1913 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1915 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1917 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1918 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1919 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1921 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1922 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1926 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1927 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1928 usually printing nothing.
1930 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1932 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1933 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1934 them with hard-linked directories.
1936 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1937 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1938 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1940 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1941 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1942 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1944 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1947 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1948 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1950 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1951 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1953 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1954 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1956 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1957 all command-line arguments.
1959 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1961 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1963 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1964 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1966 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1968 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1969 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1970 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1971 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1972 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1974 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1975 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1977 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1978 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1979 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1980 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1982 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1984 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1988 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1989 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1991 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1992 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1994 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1995 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1997 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1998 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
2000 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2001 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2003 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2005 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2006 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2007 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2010 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2012 ** Build-related bug fixes
2014 installing .mo files would fail
2017 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2021 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2023 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2026 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2030 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2031 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2035 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2037 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2038 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2040 ** Deprecated options
2042 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2043 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
2045 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2049 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2051 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2052 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2053 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2054 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2056 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2059 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2065 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2070 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2072 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2074 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2075 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2076 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2078 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2079 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2080 problematic usages. These include:
2082 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2083 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2084 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2085 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2086 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2087 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2088 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2089 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2090 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2092 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2093 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2095 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2096 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2097 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2098 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2100 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2101 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2102 between binary and text files.
2104 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2108 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2112 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2113 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2115 head tac tail tee tr
2116 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2118 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2119 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2121 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2122 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2123 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2125 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2127 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2129 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2130 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2131 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2135 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2137 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2138 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2140 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2141 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2142 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2146 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2147 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2151 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2152 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2153 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2157 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2158 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2162 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2164 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2166 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2170 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2171 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2172 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2174 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2175 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2176 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2177 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2178 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2180 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2184 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2185 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2186 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2188 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2190 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2191 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2192 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2193 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2195 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2197 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2198 rather than silently wrapping around.
2200 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2201 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2203 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2204 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2206 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2207 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2208 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2209 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2211 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2213 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2215 ** Improved robustness
2217 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2218 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2219 no matter how large the result.
2221 ** Improved portability
2223 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2224 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2226 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2228 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2229 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2230 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2232 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2233 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2237 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2238 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2240 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2242 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2243 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2244 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2245 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2247 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2248 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2250 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2251 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2252 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2254 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2256 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2257 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2259 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2260 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2262 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2264 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2265 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2267 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2268 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2270 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2271 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2272 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2274 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2276 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2278 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2282 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2284 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2285 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2286 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2288 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2289 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2291 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2292 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2293 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2295 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2296 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2298 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2299 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2300 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2301 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2303 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2304 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2306 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2307 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2308 the file system does not support it.
2310 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2312 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2313 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2315 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2317 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2318 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2320 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2321 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2322 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2323 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2325 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2326 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2329 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2330 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2331 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2332 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2334 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2335 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2336 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2337 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2339 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2340 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2342 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2344 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2345 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2346 reporting incorrect results.
2350 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2351 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2353 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2356 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2358 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2359 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2361 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2362 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2364 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2367 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2368 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2369 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2370 the file name does not look like a page range.
2372 printf has several changes:
2374 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2375 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2377 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2378 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2379 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2381 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2382 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2385 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2386 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2388 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2389 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2391 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2393 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2394 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2396 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2398 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2400 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2401 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2402 when first encountering the directory.
2406 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2407 output; POSIX requires this.
2409 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2410 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2412 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2414 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2415 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2417 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2418 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2420 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2421 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2422 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2423 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2424 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2425 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2426 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2428 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2429 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2430 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2432 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2433 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2435 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2437 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2439 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2440 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2441 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2442 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2444 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2448 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2449 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2450 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2451 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2452 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2454 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2455 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2456 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2458 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2459 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2461 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2462 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2464 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2465 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2466 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2467 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2468 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2470 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2471 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2473 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2474 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2476 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2478 nocreat do not create the output file
2479 excl fail if the output file already exists
2480 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2481 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2483 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2485 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2486 direct use direct I/O for data
2487 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2488 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2489 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2490 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2491 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2493 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2495 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2496 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2499 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2500 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2501 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2502 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2503 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2504 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2506 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2507 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2509 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2512 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2514 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2516 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2517 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2519 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2520 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2521 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2523 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2524 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2525 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2527 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2529 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2530 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2532 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2533 for compatibility with bash.
2535 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2537 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2538 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2539 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2540 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2542 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2543 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2545 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2546 ls supports TABSIZE.
2547 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2548 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2549 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2551 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2554 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2556 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2557 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2558 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2559 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2560 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2561 an offset, not as a file name.
2563 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2564 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2566 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2567 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2569 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2570 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2572 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2573 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2574 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2576 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2577 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2579 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2580 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2584 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2586 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2588 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2592 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2593 or more arguments between partitions.
2595 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2596 holes in the destination.
2598 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2599 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2600 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2601 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2602 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2603 terminates immediately.
2605 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2607 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2609 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2610 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2611 not the empty string.
2613 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2614 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2618 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2619 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2620 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2623 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2630 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2634 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2635 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2637 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2638 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2640 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2641 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2642 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2645 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2649 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2650 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2652 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2653 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2655 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2656 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2657 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2659 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2661 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2664 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2666 ** Configuration option
2668 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2669 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2673 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2674 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2678 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2679 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2680 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2683 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2684 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2685 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2686 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2687 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2688 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2689 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2692 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2696 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2697 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2698 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2700 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2701 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2703 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2705 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2706 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2707 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2708 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2710 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2712 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2713 not just the ones that reference directories
2715 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2716 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2718 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2719 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2720 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2722 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2723 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2724 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2725 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2726 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2727 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2729 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2734 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2735 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2737 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2739 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2741 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2743 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2744 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2746 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2747 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2749 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2751 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2755 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2757 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2759 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2760 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2761 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2762 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2763 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2765 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2766 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2768 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2769 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2771 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2772 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2774 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2775 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2776 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2780 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2781 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2782 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2783 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2784 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2785 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2786 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2787 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2788 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2789 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2790 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2791 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2792 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2793 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2795 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2797 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2798 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2800 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2802 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2804 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2805 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2807 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2809 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2810 without a trailing newline.
2812 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2813 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2815 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2818 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2822 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2824 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2826 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2827 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2828 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2829 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2831 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2833 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2834 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2835 be printed without leading spaces.
2837 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2838 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2843 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2844 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2845 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2847 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2849 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2850 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2852 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2853 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2855 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2856 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2858 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2860 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2862 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2864 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2865 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2867 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2869 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2871 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2872 byte offsets are specified.
2875 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2878 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2881 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2882 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2883 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2884 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2885 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2886 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2887 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2888 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2889 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2890 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2891 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2892 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2893 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2894 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2895 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2896 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2897 directory where M has write access.
2898 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2899 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2900 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2903 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2904 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2905 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2906 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2907 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2908 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2909 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2910 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2911 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2912 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2913 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2914 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2915 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2916 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2917 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2918 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2919 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2920 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2921 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2922 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2923 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2924 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2925 appeared one additional time.
2927 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2928 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2929 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2930 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2933 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2934 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2935 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2936 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2937 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2938 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2939 if there were more than 338.
2941 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2942 - false --help now exits nonzero
2945 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2946 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2947 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2948 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2951 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2952 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2953 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2954 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2955 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2958 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2959 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2960 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2961 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2962 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2963 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2964 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2967 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2968 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2969 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2970 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2971 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2972 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2974 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2975 under certain unusual conditions
2976 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2977 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2980 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2981 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2982 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2983 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2984 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2985 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2986 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2987 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2988 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2989 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2990 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2991 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2992 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2993 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2994 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2995 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2998 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2999 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3002 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3003 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3004 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3005 involving hard-linked directories
3006 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3007 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
3008 character-special and block files
3011 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3012 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3013 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3014 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3015 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3016 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3017 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3018 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3019 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3021 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
3022 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
3023 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3024 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3025 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3026 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3027 specified on the command line.
3028 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3029 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
3030 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3031 the first file untouched.
3032 * readlink: new program
3033 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3034 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3035 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3036 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3037 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3038 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3041 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3042 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3043 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3044 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3045 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3046 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3047 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3048 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3049 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3050 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3051 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3052 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3054 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3055 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3056 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3058 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3059 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3060 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3061 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3062 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3063 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3064 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3065 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3068 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3069 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3072 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3073 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3074 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3075 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3076 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3077 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3078 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3081 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3082 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3084 ========================================================================
3085 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3086 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3089 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3091 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3092 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3093 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3094 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3095 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3096 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3097 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3098 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3099 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3100 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3101 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3102 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3104 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3105 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3106 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3107 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3109 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3112 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3114 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3115 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3116 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3117 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3118 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3119 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3120 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3123 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3124 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3125 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3126 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3127 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3128 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3129 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3130 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3131 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3132 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3133 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3134 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3135 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3136 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3137 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3138 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3140 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3141 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3143 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3144 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3145 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3146 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3147 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3148 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3150 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3151 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3152 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3153 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3154 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3155 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3156 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3158 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3159 the source files in the following example:
3160 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3161 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3162 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3163 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3164 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3165 links between source files with --preserve=links
3166 * cp accepts new options:
3167 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3168 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3169 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3170 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3171 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3172 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3173 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3174 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3175 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3177 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3178 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3179 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3180 even though it's older than dest.
3181 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3182 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3183 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3184 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3185 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3187 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3188 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3189 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3190 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3191 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3192 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3193 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3195 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3196 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3197 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3199 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3200 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3201 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3202 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3203 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3204 This is the default.
3206 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3207 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3208 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3209 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3210 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3212 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3215 ========================================================================
3216 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3217 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3220 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3221 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3223 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3224 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3225 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3226 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3227 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3229 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3230 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3231 that specifies a non-directory
3234 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3235 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3236 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3237 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3238 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3239 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3240 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3241 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3242 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3243 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3244 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3245 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3246 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3247 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3248 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3249 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3250 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3251 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3252 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3253 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3254 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3255 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3256 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3257 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3259 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3260 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3261 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3263 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3265 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3266 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3268 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3269 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3270 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3271 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3272 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3274 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3275 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3276 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3277 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3278 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3280 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3282 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3283 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3284 * still more portability fixes
3285 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3286 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3288 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3290 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3292 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3294 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3295 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3296 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3297 there is any time remaining
3298 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3300 ========================================================================
3301 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3302 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3304 This package began as the union of the following:
3305 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3307 ========================================================================
3309 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3311 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3312 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3313 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3314 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3315 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3316 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.