1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
6 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
10 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
11 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
12 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
14 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
15 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
17 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
18 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
19 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
20 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
21 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
23 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
24 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
25 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
26 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
27 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
28 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
29 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
30 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
32 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
33 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
35 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
36 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
38 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
39 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
41 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
42 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
43 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
45 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
46 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
47 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
48 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
50 ** Changes in behavior
52 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
53 when -v or -c specified.
55 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
56 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
60 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
61 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
62 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
63 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
64 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
66 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
67 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
68 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
70 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
71 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
72 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
73 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
74 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
75 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
76 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
78 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
79 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
80 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
84 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
85 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
87 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
90 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
91 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
93 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
94 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
96 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
97 For example `shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2` no longer exhausts memory.
99 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
101 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
105 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
106 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
108 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
111 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
115 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
116 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
118 ** Changes in behavior
120 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
121 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
122 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
123 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
124 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
125 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
127 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
128 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
129 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
133 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
136 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
140 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
141 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
142 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
144 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
145 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
146 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
148 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
149 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
150 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
152 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
153 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
155 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
156 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
158 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
159 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
161 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
162 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
166 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
167 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
168 processed portion thereof.
170 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
171 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
173 ** Changes in behavior
175 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
176 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
177 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
179 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
180 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
181 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
183 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
184 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
186 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
187 Use --preserve-context instead.
189 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
192 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
196 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
197 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
198 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
199 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
200 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
202 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
203 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
205 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
206 reject file names invalid for that file system.
208 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
209 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
213 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
214 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
215 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
216 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
217 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
218 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
219 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
220 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
222 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
223 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
224 the same number of fields are output for each line.
226 ** Changes in behavior
228 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
229 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
230 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
233 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
237 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
238 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
239 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
242 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
246 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
247 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
249 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
250 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
252 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
253 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
255 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
256 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
257 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
258 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
260 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
261 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
263 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
264 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
265 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
267 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
269 ** Changes in behavior
271 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
272 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
273 to the number of available processors.
277 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
280 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
284 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
285 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
286 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
287 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
289 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
290 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
291 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
293 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
294 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
296 ** Changes in behavior
298 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
299 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
301 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
302 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
303 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
304 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
305 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
306 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
308 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
309 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
310 the same way as the others.
313 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
317 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
318 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
319 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
321 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
322 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
324 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
325 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
326 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
328 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
329 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
331 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
332 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
334 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
335 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
336 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
338 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
339 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
340 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
341 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
345 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
346 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
348 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
351 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
352 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
354 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
356 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
357 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
358 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
360 ** Changes in behavior
362 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
363 rather than its aliased target.
365 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
366 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
367 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
369 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
370 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
371 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
372 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
373 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
374 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
375 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
376 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
378 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
380 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
382 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
383 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
386 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
387 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
388 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
389 control like taskset for example.
391 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
393 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
394 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
395 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
396 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
397 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
398 includes %C when context information is available.
400 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
401 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
402 rather than a file system attribute.
404 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
405 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
406 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
407 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
409 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
410 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
411 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
413 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
414 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
415 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
418 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
422 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
423 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
425 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
427 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
428 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
430 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
431 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
432 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
433 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
435 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
436 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
437 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
441 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
442 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
444 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
445 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
446 duration after the initial signal was sent.
448 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
449 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
450 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
451 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
452 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
453 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
454 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
455 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
456 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
458 ** Changes in behavior
460 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
461 sequence when it would be a no-op.
463 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
464 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
467 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
471 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
472 of available processors, which may not have been the case
473 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
474 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
478 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
479 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
481 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
482 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
483 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
484 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
486 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
487 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
488 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
491 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
495 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
496 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
497 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
499 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
500 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
501 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
503 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
504 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
506 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
507 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
508 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
509 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
511 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
512 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
513 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
515 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
516 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
517 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
518 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
520 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
521 renamed-aside and then recreated.
522 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
524 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
525 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
526 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
527 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
529 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
530 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
531 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
533 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
534 processes will not intersperse their output.
535 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
538 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
542 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
543 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
545 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
546 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
548 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
549 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
550 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
551 the presence of the empty string argument.
552 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
554 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
555 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
556 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
557 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
559 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
560 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
562 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
563 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
564 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
566 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
567 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
568 and with a malicious user on the same system
569 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
570 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
573 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
577 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
578 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
579 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
581 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
582 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
583 offending directory and all "contents."
585 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
586 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
587 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
589 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
590 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
591 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
593 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
594 processes will not intersperse their output.
595 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
596 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
598 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
599 output the name of the file to stdout.
600 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
602 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
603 call fails with errno == EACCES.
604 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
606 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
607 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
610 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
611 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
612 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
614 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
615 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
616 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
617 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
618 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
619 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
621 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
622 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
623 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
624 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
626 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
627 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
629 ** Changes in behavior
631 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
632 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
633 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
634 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
635 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
637 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
638 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
639 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
640 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
642 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
644 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
645 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
646 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
647 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
648 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
652 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
656 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
657 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
659 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
660 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
662 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
663 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
664 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
666 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
667 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
670 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
674 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
675 when the source file doesn't have write access.
676 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
678 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
679 to accommodate leap seconds.
680 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
682 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
683 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
684 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
686 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
688 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
689 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
690 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
692 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
693 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
694 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
695 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
696 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
700 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
701 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
702 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
703 directory or a symlink to a directory.
705 ** Changes in behavior
707 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
708 environment variable is set.
710 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
711 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
712 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
716 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
717 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
718 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
719 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
721 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
722 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
723 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
724 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
728 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
729 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
730 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
732 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
733 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
734 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
735 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
736 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
737 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
740 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
741 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
744 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
748 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
749 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
750 and libraries tested at configure time.
751 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
753 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
754 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
756 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
757 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
759 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
760 printing a summary to stderr.
761 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
763 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
764 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
765 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
767 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
768 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
770 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
771 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
772 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
773 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
775 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
776 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
777 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
778 which is relatively unusual.
779 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
781 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
782 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
783 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
784 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
785 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
786 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
787 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
791 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
792 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
793 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
794 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
795 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
799 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
800 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
802 ** Changes in behavior
804 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
805 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
806 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
807 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
808 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
811 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
815 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
816 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
818 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
819 before data copying has started.
821 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
822 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
824 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
825 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
826 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
827 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
829 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
830 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
831 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
832 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
834 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
839 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
840 for its standard streams.
842 ** Changes in behavior
844 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
845 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
846 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
847 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
848 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
849 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
851 ** Deprecated options
853 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
854 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
858 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
860 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
861 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
864 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
866 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
867 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
869 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
870 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
873 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
877 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
878 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
879 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
880 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
882 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
883 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
884 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
885 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
886 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
891 make check: two tests have been corrected
895 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
896 inherited from gnulib.
899 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
903 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
904 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
905 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
906 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
908 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
909 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
911 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
913 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
914 systems without xattr support.
916 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
917 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
918 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
920 ** Changes in behavior
922 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
923 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
924 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
925 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
927 ** Improved robustness
929 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
930 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
931 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
932 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
933 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
934 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
935 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
936 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
937 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
941 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
942 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
944 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
945 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
946 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
947 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
948 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
951 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
955 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
956 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
957 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
961 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
962 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
963 data was read, or on process exit.
964 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
966 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
967 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
968 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
969 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
971 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
972 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
973 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
974 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
976 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
977 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
979 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
980 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
982 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
983 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
984 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
986 ** Changes in behavior
988 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
989 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
990 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
992 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
993 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
995 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
996 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
997 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1000 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1004 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1006 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1007 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1008 install: Never copies xattrs
1010 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1011 from overwriting any existing destination file
1013 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1014 mode where this feature is available.
1016 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1017 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1018 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1019 do not modify the destination at all.
1021 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1023 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1027 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1028 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1030 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1032 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1033 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1035 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1036 processing the first file name
1038 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1039 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1040 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1041 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1043 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1044 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1046 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1047 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1050 ** Changes in behavior
1052 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1053 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1055 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1056 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1057 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1059 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1060 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1062 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1064 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1065 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1066 is still marked with a '+'.
1069 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1073 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1074 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1078 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1079 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1080 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1081 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1082 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1083 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1085 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1086 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1088 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1089 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1091 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1093 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1094 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1095 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1097 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1098 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1100 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1101 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1102 used to factor large numbers.
1104 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1107 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1109 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1111 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1112 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1114 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1115 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1116 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1117 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1119 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1120 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1121 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1123 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1124 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1128 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1130 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1131 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1133 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1134 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1136 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1138 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1139 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1143 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1144 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1145 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1147 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1149 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1150 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1151 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1153 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1154 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1155 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1157 ** Changes in behavior
1159 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1160 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1163 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1167 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1168 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1169 'futimens' system calls.
1173 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1175 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1176 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1177 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1179 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1180 with no USERNAME argument.
1182 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1183 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1184 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1186 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1187 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1188 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1189 number of fields for some inputs.
1191 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1192 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1194 ** Changes in behavior
1196 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1197 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1200 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1204 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1206 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1207 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1208 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1209 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1211 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1212 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1214 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1215 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1217 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1218 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1220 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1221 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1222 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1223 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1225 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1226 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1227 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1228 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1229 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1230 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1232 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1233 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1235 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1236 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1237 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1239 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1240 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1242 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1243 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1245 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1246 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1247 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1248 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1250 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1251 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1253 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1254 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1256 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1257 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1258 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1262 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1263 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1265 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1266 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1267 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1268 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1272 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1273 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1275 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1277 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1281 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1282 which have negative errno values.
1286 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1290 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1294 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1295 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1298 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1302 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1303 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1304 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1306 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1307 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1308 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1309 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1313 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1314 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1315 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1316 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1319 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1323 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1325 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1326 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1327 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1330 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1334 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1335 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1337 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1339 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1341 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1343 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1347 ** Changes in behavior
1349 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1350 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1352 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1353 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1355 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1356 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1357 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1361 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1362 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1363 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1364 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1365 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1366 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1367 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1368 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1369 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1370 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1371 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1373 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1374 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1375 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1378 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1381 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1382 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1383 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1385 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1386 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1387 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1390 ** New build options
1392 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1393 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1394 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1395 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1397 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1398 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1399 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1400 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1401 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1402 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1403 of "make check" fail.
1405 ** Remove deprecated options
1407 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1408 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1409 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1410 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1411 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1413 ** Improved robustness
1415 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1416 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1417 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1418 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1419 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1420 loss of the contents of a/f.
1422 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1423 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1427 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1428 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1429 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1431 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1432 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1433 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1434 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1436 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1437 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1438 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1439 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1440 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1441 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1442 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1443 destination is a symlink.
1445 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1447 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1448 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1450 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1451 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1453 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1455 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1456 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1458 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1459 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1461 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1464 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1465 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1467 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1468 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1470 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1471 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1472 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1473 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1475 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1476 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1477 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1479 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1480 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1481 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1483 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1484 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1485 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1486 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1488 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1489 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1490 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1492 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1493 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1495 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1496 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1498 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1500 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1501 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1502 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1504 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1505 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1507 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1508 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1510 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1511 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1513 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1514 [present in the original version]
1517 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1521 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1523 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1524 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1525 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1527 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1528 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1530 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1534 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1535 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1537 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1538 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1540 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1541 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1543 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1544 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1545 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1546 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1547 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1548 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1550 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1551 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1554 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1555 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1557 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1560 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1561 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1562 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1564 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1565 directory is unreadable.
1567 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1568 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1569 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1571 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1572 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1573 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1574 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1575 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1578 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1579 Before it would print nothing.
1581 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1583 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1584 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1585 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1586 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1587 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1588 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1589 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1590 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1592 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1596 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1597 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1598 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1600 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1601 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1602 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1603 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1606 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1610 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1611 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1612 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1613 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1614 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1615 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1616 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1618 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1619 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1620 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1621 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1622 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1623 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1624 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1625 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1627 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1628 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1629 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1632 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1636 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1637 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1639 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1640 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1641 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1643 ** Improved robustness
1645 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1646 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1647 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1650 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1654 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1655 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1656 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1657 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1658 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1660 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1664 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1667 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1671 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1672 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1673 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1674 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1676 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1677 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1679 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1680 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1681 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1684 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1686 ** Improved robustness
1688 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1689 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1691 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1692 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1693 or NFS-mounted partition.
1695 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1696 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1700 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1701 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1702 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1703 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1704 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1705 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1707 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1708 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1710 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1711 or neglect to report file removal.
1713 For the "groups" command:
1715 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1716 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1718 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1720 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1722 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1726 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1727 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1730 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1732 ** Changes in behavior
1734 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1735 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1736 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1737 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1739 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1740 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1741 a final `./' or `../' component.
1743 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1744 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1745 this only for pipes.
1747 ** Infrastructure changes
1749 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1750 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1751 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1752 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1756 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1757 name is "." or "..".
1759 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1760 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1761 dirent.d_type support.
1763 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1764 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1766 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1767 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1768 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1769 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1772 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1774 ** Changes in behavior
1776 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1780 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1781 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1785 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1786 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1787 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1789 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1790 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1792 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1793 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1795 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1797 ** Improved robustness
1799 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1800 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1801 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1803 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1804 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1807 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1808 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1810 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1811 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1813 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1814 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1816 ** Changes in behavior
1818 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1819 where the two are distinct.
1821 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1822 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1823 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1824 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1825 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1826 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1827 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1828 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1829 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1830 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1831 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1832 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1833 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1834 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1835 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1836 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1837 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1839 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1840 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1841 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1843 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1844 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1845 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1846 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1849 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1850 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1854 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1855 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1856 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1857 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1859 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1860 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1861 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1863 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1864 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1865 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1866 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1867 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1870 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1871 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1873 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1874 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1875 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1876 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1878 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1879 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1880 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1882 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1883 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1884 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1885 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1887 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1888 and sticky) with the -m option.
1890 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1891 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1892 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1893 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1894 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1896 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1897 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1899 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1903 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1904 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1905 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1906 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1908 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1910 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1912 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1913 silently ignoring one of them.
1915 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1916 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1917 containing this change was 5.92.
1919 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1920 automatically newline terminated.
1922 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1923 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1924 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1925 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1928 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1929 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1930 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1933 ** Scheduled for removal
1935 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1936 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1938 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1939 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1940 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1941 command to unlink a directory.
1943 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1944 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1945 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1946 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1950 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1951 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1952 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1953 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1954 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1955 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1959 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1960 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1962 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1964 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1965 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1966 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1968 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1969 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1972 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1973 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1975 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1976 list directories before files.
1978 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1979 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1980 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1981 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1984 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1986 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1988 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1989 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1990 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1992 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1993 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1997 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1998 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1999 usually printing nothing.
2001 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2003 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2004 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2005 them with hard-linked directories.
2007 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2008 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2009 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2011 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2012 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2013 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2015 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2018 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2019 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2021 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2022 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2024 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2025 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2027 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2028 all command-line arguments.
2030 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2032 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2034 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2035 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2037 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2039 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2040 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2041 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2042 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2043 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2045 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2046 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2048 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2049 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2050 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2051 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2053 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2055 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2059 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2060 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2062 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2063 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2065 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
2066 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2068 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2069 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
2071 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2072 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2074 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2076 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2077 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2078 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2081 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2083 ** Build-related bug fixes
2085 installing .mo files would fail
2088 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2092 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2094 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2097 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2101 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2102 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2106 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2108 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2109 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2111 ** Deprecated options
2113 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2114 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
2116 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2120 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2122 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2123 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2124 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2125 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2127 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2130 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2136 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2141 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2143 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2145 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2146 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2147 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2149 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2150 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2151 problematic usages. These include:
2153 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2154 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2155 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2156 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2157 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2158 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2159 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2160 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2161 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2163 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2164 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2166 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2167 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2168 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2169 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2171 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2172 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2173 between binary and text files.
2175 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2179 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2183 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2184 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2186 head tac tail tee tr
2187 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2189 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2190 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2192 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2193 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2194 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2196 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2198 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2200 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2201 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2202 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2206 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2208 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2209 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2211 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2212 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2213 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2217 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2218 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2222 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2223 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2224 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2228 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2229 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2233 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2235 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2237 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2241 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2242 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2243 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2245 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2246 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2247 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2248 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2249 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2251 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2255 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2256 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2257 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2259 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2261 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2262 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2263 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2264 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2266 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2268 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2269 rather than silently wrapping around.
2271 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2272 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2274 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2275 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2277 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2278 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2279 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2280 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2282 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2284 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2286 ** Improved robustness
2288 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2289 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2290 no matter how large the result.
2292 ** Improved portability
2294 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2295 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2297 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2299 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2300 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2301 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2303 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2304 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2308 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2309 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2311 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2313 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2314 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2315 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2316 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2318 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2319 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2321 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2322 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2323 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2325 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2327 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2328 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2330 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2331 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2333 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2335 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2336 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2338 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2339 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2341 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2342 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2343 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2345 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2347 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2349 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2353 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2355 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2356 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2357 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2359 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2360 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2362 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2363 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2364 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2366 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2367 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2369 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2370 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2371 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2372 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2374 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2375 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2377 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2378 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2379 the file system does not support it.
2381 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2383 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2384 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2386 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2388 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2389 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2391 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2392 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2393 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2394 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2396 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2397 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2400 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2401 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2402 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2403 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2405 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2406 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2407 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2408 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2410 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2411 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2413 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2415 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2416 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2417 reporting incorrect results.
2421 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2422 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2424 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2427 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2429 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2430 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2432 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2433 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2435 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2438 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2439 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2440 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2441 the file name does not look like a page range.
2443 printf has several changes:
2445 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2446 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2448 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2449 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2450 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2452 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2453 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2456 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2457 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2459 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2460 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2462 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2464 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2465 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2467 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2469 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2471 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2472 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2473 when first encountering the directory.
2477 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2478 output; POSIX requires this.
2480 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2481 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2483 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2485 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2486 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2488 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2489 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2491 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2492 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2493 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2494 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2495 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2496 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2497 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2499 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2500 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2501 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2503 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2504 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2506 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2508 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2510 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2511 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2512 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2513 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2515 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2519 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2520 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2521 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2522 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2523 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2525 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2526 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2527 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2529 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2530 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2532 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2533 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2535 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2536 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2537 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2538 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2539 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2541 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2542 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2544 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2545 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2547 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2549 nocreat do not create the output file
2550 excl fail if the output file already exists
2551 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2552 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2554 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2556 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2557 direct use direct I/O for data
2558 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2559 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2560 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2561 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2562 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2564 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2566 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2567 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2570 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2571 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2572 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2573 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2574 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2575 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2577 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2578 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2580 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2583 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2585 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2587 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2588 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2590 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2591 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2592 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2594 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2595 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2596 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2598 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2600 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2601 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2603 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2604 for compatibility with bash.
2606 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2608 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2609 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2610 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2611 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2613 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2614 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2616 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2617 ls supports TABSIZE.
2618 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2619 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2620 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2622 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2625 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2627 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2628 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2629 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2630 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2631 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2632 an offset, not as a file name.
2634 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2635 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2637 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2638 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2640 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2641 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2643 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2644 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2645 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2647 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2648 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2650 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2651 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2655 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2657 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2659 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2663 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2664 or more arguments between partitions.
2666 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2667 holes in the destination.
2669 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2670 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2671 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2672 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2673 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2674 terminates immediately.
2676 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2678 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2680 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2681 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2682 not the empty string.
2684 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2685 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2689 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2690 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2691 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2694 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2701 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2705 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2706 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2708 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2709 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2711 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2712 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2713 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2716 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2720 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2721 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2723 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2724 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2726 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2727 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2728 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2730 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2732 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2735 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2737 ** Configuration option
2739 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2740 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2744 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2745 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2749 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2750 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2751 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2754 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2755 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2756 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2757 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2758 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2759 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2760 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2763 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2767 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2768 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2769 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2771 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2772 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2774 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2776 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2777 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2778 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2779 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2781 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2783 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2784 not just the ones that reference directories
2786 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2787 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2789 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2790 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2791 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2793 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2794 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2795 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2796 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2797 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2798 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2800 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2805 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2806 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2808 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2810 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2812 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2814 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2815 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2817 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2818 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2820 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2822 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2826 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2828 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2830 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2831 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2832 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2833 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2834 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2836 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2837 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2839 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2840 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2842 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2843 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2845 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2846 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2847 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2851 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2852 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2853 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2854 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2855 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2856 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2857 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2858 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2859 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2860 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2861 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2862 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2863 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2864 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2866 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2868 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2869 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2871 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2873 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2875 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2876 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2878 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2880 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2881 without a trailing newline.
2883 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2884 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2886 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2889 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2893 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2895 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2897 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2898 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2899 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2900 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2902 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2904 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2905 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2906 be printed without leading spaces.
2908 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2909 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2914 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2915 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2916 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2918 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2920 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2921 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2923 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2924 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2926 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2927 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2929 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2931 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2933 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2935 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2936 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2938 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2940 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2942 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2943 byte offsets are specified.
2946 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2949 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2952 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2953 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2954 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2955 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2956 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2957 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2958 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2959 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2960 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2961 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2962 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2963 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2964 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2965 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2966 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2967 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2968 directory where M has write access.
2969 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2970 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2971 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2974 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2975 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2976 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2977 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2978 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2979 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2980 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2981 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2982 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2983 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2984 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2985 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2986 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2987 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2988 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2989 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2990 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2991 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2992 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2993 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2994 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2995 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2996 appeared one additional time.
2998 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2999 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3000 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3001 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3004 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
3005 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3006 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3007 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3008 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3009 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3010 if there were more than 338.
3012 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3013 - false --help now exits nonzero
3016 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3017 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3018 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3019 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3022 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3023 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
3024 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
3025 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3026 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3029 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3030 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3031 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3032 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
3033 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3034 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3035 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3038 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3039 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3040 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3041 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3042 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3043 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3045 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3046 under certain unusual conditions
3047 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3048 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3051 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3052 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3053 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3054 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3055 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3056 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
3057 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3058 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3059 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
3060 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
3061 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3062 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3063 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3064 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3065 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3066 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3069 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3070 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3073 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3074 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3075 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3076 involving hard-linked directories
3077 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3078 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
3079 character-special and block files
3082 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3083 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3084 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3085 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3086 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3087 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3088 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3089 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3090 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3092 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
3093 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
3094 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3095 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3096 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3097 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3098 specified on the command line.
3099 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3100 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
3101 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3102 the first file untouched.
3103 * readlink: new program
3104 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3105 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3106 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3107 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3108 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3109 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3112 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3113 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3114 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3115 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3116 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3117 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3118 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3119 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3120 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3121 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3122 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3123 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3125 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3126 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3127 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3129 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3130 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3131 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3132 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3133 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3134 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3135 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3136 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3139 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3140 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3143 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3144 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3145 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3146 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3147 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3148 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3149 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3152 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3153 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3155 ========================================================================
3156 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3157 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3160 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3162 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3163 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3164 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3165 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3166 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3167 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3168 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3169 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3170 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3171 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3172 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3173 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3175 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3176 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3177 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3178 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3180 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3183 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3185 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3186 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3187 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3188 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3189 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3190 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3191 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3194 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3195 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3196 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3197 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3198 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3199 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3200 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3201 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3202 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3203 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3204 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3205 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3206 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3207 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3208 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3209 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3211 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3212 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3214 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3215 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3216 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3217 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3218 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3219 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3221 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3222 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3223 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3224 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3225 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3226 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3227 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3229 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3230 the source files in the following example:
3231 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3232 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3233 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3234 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3235 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3236 links between source files with --preserve=links
3237 * cp accepts new options:
3238 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3239 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3240 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3241 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3242 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3243 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3244 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3245 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3246 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3248 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3249 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3250 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3251 even though it's older than dest.
3252 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3253 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3254 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3255 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3256 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3258 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3259 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3260 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3261 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3262 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3263 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3264 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3266 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3267 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3268 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3270 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3271 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3272 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3273 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3274 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3275 This is the default.
3277 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3278 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3279 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3280 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3281 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3283 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3286 ========================================================================
3287 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3288 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3291 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3292 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3294 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3295 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3296 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3297 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3298 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3300 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3301 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3302 that specifies a non-directory
3305 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3306 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3307 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3308 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3309 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3310 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3311 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3312 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3313 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3314 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3315 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3316 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3317 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3318 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3319 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3320 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3321 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3322 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3323 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3324 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3325 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3326 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3327 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3328 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3330 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3331 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3332 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3334 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3336 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3337 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3339 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3340 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3341 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3342 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3343 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3345 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3346 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3347 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3348 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3349 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3351 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3353 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3354 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3355 * still more portability fixes
3356 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3357 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3359 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3361 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3363 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3365 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3366 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3367 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3368 there is any time remaining
3369 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3371 ========================================================================
3372 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3373 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3375 This package began as the union of the following:
3376 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3378 ========================================================================
3380 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3382 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3383 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3384 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3385 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3386 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3387 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.