1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
8 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
10 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
11 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
13 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
14 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
16 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
17 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
18 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
19 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
21 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
22 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
24 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
25 and no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses.
27 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
31 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
34 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
38 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
39 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
40 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
41 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
43 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
44 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
45 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
47 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
48 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
50 ** Changes in behavior
52 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
53 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
55 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
56 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
57 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
58 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
59 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
60 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
62 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
63 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
64 the same way as the others.
67 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
71 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
72 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
73 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
75 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
76 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
78 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
79 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
80 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
82 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
83 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
85 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
86 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
88 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
89 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
90 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
92 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
93 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
94 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
95 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
99 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
100 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
102 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
105 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
106 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
108 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
110 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
111 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
112 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
114 ** Changes in behavior
116 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
117 rather than its aliased target.
119 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
120 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
121 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
123 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
124 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
125 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
126 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
127 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
128 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
129 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
130 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
132 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
134 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
136 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
137 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
140 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
141 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
142 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
143 control like taskset for example.
145 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
147 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
148 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
149 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
150 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
151 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
152 includes %C when context information is available.
154 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
155 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
156 rather than a file system attribute.
158 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
159 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
160 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
161 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
163 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
164 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
165 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
167 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
168 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
169 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
172 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
176 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
177 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
179 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
181 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
182 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
184 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
185 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
186 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
187 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
189 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
190 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
191 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
195 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
196 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
198 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
199 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
200 duration after the initial signal was sent.
202 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
203 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
204 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
205 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
206 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
207 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
208 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
209 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
210 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
212 ** Changes in behavior
214 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
215 sequence when it would be a no-op.
217 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
218 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
221 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
225 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
226 of available processors, which may not have been the case
227 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
228 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
232 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
233 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
235 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
236 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
237 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
238 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
240 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
241 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
242 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
245 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
249 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
250 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
251 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
253 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
254 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
255 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
257 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
258 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
260 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
261 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
262 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
263 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
265 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
266 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
267 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
269 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
270 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
271 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
272 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
274 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
275 renamed-aside and then recreated.
276 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
278 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
279 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
280 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
281 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
283 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
284 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
285 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
287 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
288 processes will not intersperse their output.
289 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
292 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
296 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
297 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
299 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
300 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
302 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
303 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
304 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
305 the presence of the empty string argument.
306 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
308 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
309 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
310 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
311 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
313 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
314 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
316 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
317 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
318 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
320 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
321 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
322 and with a malicious user on the same system
323 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
324 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
327 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
331 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
332 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
333 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
335 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
336 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
337 offending directory and all "contents."
339 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
340 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
341 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
343 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
344 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
345 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
347 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
348 processes will not intersperse their output.
349 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
350 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
352 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
353 output the name of the file to stdout.
354 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
356 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
357 call fails with errno == EACCES.
358 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
360 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
361 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
364 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
365 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
366 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
368 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
369 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
370 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
371 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
372 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
373 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
375 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
376 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
377 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
378 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
380 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
381 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
383 ** Changes in behavior
385 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
386 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
387 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
388 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
389 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
391 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
392 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
393 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
394 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
396 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
398 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
399 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
400 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
401 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
402 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
406 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
410 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
411 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
413 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
414 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
416 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
417 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
418 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
420 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
421 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
424 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
428 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
429 when the source file doesn't have write access.
430 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
432 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
433 to accommodate leap seconds.
434 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
436 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
437 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
438 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
440 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
442 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
443 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
444 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
446 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
447 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
448 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
449 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
450 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
454 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
455 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
456 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
457 directory or a symlink to a directory.
459 ** Changes in behavior
461 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
462 environment variable is set.
464 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
465 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
466 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
470 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
471 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
472 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
473 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
475 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
476 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
477 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
478 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
482 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
483 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
484 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
486 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
487 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
488 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
489 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
490 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
491 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
494 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
495 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
498 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
502 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
503 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
504 and libraries tested at configure time.
505 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
507 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
508 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
510 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
511 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
513 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
514 printing a summary to stderr.
515 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
517 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
518 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
519 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
521 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
522 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
524 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
525 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
526 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
527 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
529 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
530 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
531 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
532 which is relatively unusual.
533 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
535 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
536 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
537 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
538 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
539 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
540 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
541 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
545 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
546 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
547 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
548 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
549 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
553 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
554 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
556 ** Changes in behavior
558 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
559 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
560 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
561 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
562 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
565 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
569 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
570 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
572 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
573 before data copying has started.
575 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
576 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
578 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
579 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
580 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
581 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
583 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
584 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
585 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
586 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
588 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
593 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
594 for its standard streams.
596 ** Changes in behavior
598 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
599 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
600 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
601 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
602 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
603 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
605 ** Deprecated options
607 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
608 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
612 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
614 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
615 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
618 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
620 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
621 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
623 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
624 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
627 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
631 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
632 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
633 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
634 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
636 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
637 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
638 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
639 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
640 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
645 make check: two tests have been corrected
649 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
650 inherited from gnulib.
653 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
657 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
658 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
659 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
660 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
662 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
663 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
665 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
667 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
668 systems without xattr support.
670 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
671 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
672 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
674 ** Changes in behavior
676 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
677 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
678 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
679 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
681 ** Improved robustness
683 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
684 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
685 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
686 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
687 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
688 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
689 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
690 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
691 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
695 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
696 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
698 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
699 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
700 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
701 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
702 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
705 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
709 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
710 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
711 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
715 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
716 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
717 data was read, or on process exit.
718 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
720 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
721 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
722 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
723 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
725 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
726 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
727 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
728 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
730 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
731 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
733 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
734 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
736 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
737 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
738 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
740 ** Changes in behavior
742 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
743 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
744 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
746 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
747 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
749 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
750 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
751 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
754 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
758 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
760 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
761 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
762 install: Never copies xattrs
764 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
765 from overwriting any existing destination file
767 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
768 mode where this feature is available.
770 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
771 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
772 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
773 do not modify the destination at all.
775 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
777 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
781 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
782 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
784 cp uses much less memory in some situations
786 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
787 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
789 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
790 processing the first file name
792 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
793 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
794 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
795 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
797 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
798 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
800 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
801 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
804 ** Changes in behavior
806 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
807 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
809 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
810 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
811 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
813 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
814 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
816 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
818 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
819 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
820 is still marked with a '+'.
823 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
827 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
828 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
832 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
833 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
834 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
835 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
836 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
837 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
839 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
840 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
842 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
843 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
845 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
847 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
848 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
849 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
851 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
852 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
854 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
855 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
856 used to factor large numbers.
858 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
861 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
863 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
865 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
866 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
868 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
869 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
870 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
871 maximum command-line (argv) length.
873 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
874 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
875 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
877 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
878 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
882 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
884 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
885 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
887 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
888 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
890 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
892 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
893 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
897 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
898 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
899 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
901 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
903 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
904 no matter how many files are in a given directory
906 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
907 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
908 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
910 ** Changes in behavior
912 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
913 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
916 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
920 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
922 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
923 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
924 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
926 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
927 with no USERNAME argument.
929 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
930 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
931 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
933 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
934 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
935 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
936 number of fields for some inputs.
938 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
939 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
941 ** Changes in behavior
943 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
944 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
947 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
951 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
953 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
954 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
955 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
956 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
958 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
959 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
961 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
962 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
964 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
965 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
967 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
968 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
969 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
970 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
972 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
973 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
974 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
975 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
976 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
977 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
979 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
980 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
982 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
983 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
984 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
986 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
987 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
989 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
990 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
992 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
993 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
994 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
995 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
997 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
998 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1000 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1001 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1003 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1004 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1005 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1009 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1010 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1012 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1013 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1014 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1015 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1019 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1020 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1022 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1024 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1028 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1029 which have negative errno values.
1033 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1037 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1041 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1042 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1045 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1049 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1050 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1051 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1053 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1054 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1055 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1056 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1060 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1061 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1062 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1063 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1066 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1070 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1072 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1073 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1074 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1077 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1081 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1082 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1084 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1086 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1088 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1090 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1094 ** Changes in behavior
1096 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1097 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1099 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1100 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1102 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1103 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1104 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1108 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1109 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1110 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1111 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1112 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1113 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1114 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1115 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1116 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1117 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1118 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1120 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1121 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1122 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1125 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1128 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1129 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1130 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1132 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1133 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1134 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1137 ** New build options
1139 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1140 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1141 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1142 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1144 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1145 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1146 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1147 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1148 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1149 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1150 of "make check" fail.
1152 ** Remove deprecated options
1154 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1155 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1156 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1157 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1158 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1160 ** Improved robustness
1162 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1163 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1164 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1165 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1166 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1167 loss of the contents of a/f.
1169 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1170 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1174 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1175 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1176 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1178 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1179 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1180 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1181 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1183 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1184 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1185 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1186 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1187 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1188 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1189 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1190 destination is a symlink.
1192 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1194 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1195 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1197 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1198 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1200 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1202 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1203 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1205 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1206 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1208 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1211 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1212 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1214 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1215 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1217 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1218 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1219 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1220 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1222 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1223 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1224 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1226 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1227 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1228 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1230 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1231 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1232 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1233 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1235 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1236 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1237 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1239 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1240 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1242 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1243 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1245 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1247 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1248 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1249 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1251 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1252 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1254 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1255 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1257 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1258 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1260 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1261 [present in the original version]
1264 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1268 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1270 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1271 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1272 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1274 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1275 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1277 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1281 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1282 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1284 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1285 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1287 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1288 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1290 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1291 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1292 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1293 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1294 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1295 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1297 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1298 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1301 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1302 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1304 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1307 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1308 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1309 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1311 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1312 directory is unreadable.
1314 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1315 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1316 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1318 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1319 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1320 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1321 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1322 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1325 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1326 Before it would print nothing.
1328 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1330 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1331 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1332 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1333 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1334 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1335 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1336 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1337 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1339 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1343 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1344 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1345 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1347 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1348 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1349 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1350 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1353 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1357 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1358 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1359 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1360 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1361 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1362 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1363 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1365 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1366 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1367 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1368 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1369 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1370 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1371 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1372 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1374 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1375 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1376 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1379 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1383 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1384 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1386 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1387 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1388 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1390 ** Improved robustness
1392 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1393 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1394 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1397 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1401 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1402 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1403 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1404 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1405 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1407 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1411 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1414 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1418 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1419 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1420 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1421 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1423 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1424 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1426 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1427 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1428 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1431 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1433 ** Improved robustness
1435 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1436 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1438 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1439 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1440 or NFS-mounted partition.
1442 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1443 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1447 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1448 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1449 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1450 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1451 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1452 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1454 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1455 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1457 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1458 or neglect to report file removal.
1460 For the "groups" command:
1462 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1463 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1465 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1467 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1469 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1473 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1474 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1477 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1479 ** Changes in behavior
1481 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1482 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1483 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1484 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1486 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1487 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1488 a final `./' or `../' component.
1490 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1491 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1492 this only for pipes.
1494 ** Infrastructure changes
1496 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1497 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1498 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1499 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1503 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1504 name is "." or "..".
1506 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1507 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1508 dirent.d_type support.
1510 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1511 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1513 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1514 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1515 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1516 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1519 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1521 ** Changes in behavior
1523 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1527 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1528 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1532 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1533 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1534 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1536 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1537 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1539 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1540 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1542 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1544 ** Improved robustness
1546 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1547 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1548 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1550 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1551 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1554 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1555 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1557 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1558 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1560 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1561 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1563 ** Changes in behavior
1565 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1566 where the two are distinct.
1568 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1569 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1570 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1571 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1572 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1573 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1574 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1575 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1576 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1577 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1578 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1579 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1580 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1581 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1582 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1583 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1584 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1586 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1587 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1588 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1590 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1591 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1592 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1593 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1596 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1597 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1601 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1602 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1603 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1604 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1606 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1607 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1608 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1610 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1611 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1612 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1613 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1614 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1617 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1618 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1620 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1621 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1622 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1623 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1625 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1626 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1627 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1629 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1630 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1631 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1632 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1634 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1635 and sticky) with the -m option.
1637 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1638 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1639 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1640 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1641 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1643 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1644 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1646 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1650 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1651 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1652 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1653 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1655 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1657 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1659 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1660 silently ignoring one of them.
1662 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1663 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1664 containing this change was 5.92.
1666 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1667 automatically newline terminated.
1669 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1670 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1671 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1672 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1675 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1676 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1677 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1680 ** Scheduled for removal
1682 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1683 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1685 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1686 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1687 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1688 command to unlink a directory.
1690 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1691 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1692 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1693 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1697 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1698 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1699 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1700 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1701 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1702 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1706 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1707 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1709 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1711 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1712 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1713 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1715 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1716 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1719 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1720 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1722 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1723 list directories before files.
1725 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1726 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1727 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1728 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1731 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1733 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1735 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1736 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1737 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1739 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1740 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1744 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1745 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1746 usually printing nothing.
1748 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1750 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1751 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1752 them with hard-linked directories.
1754 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1755 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1756 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1758 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1759 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1760 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1762 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1765 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1766 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1768 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1769 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1771 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1772 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1774 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1775 all command-line arguments.
1777 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1779 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1781 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1782 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1784 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1786 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1787 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1788 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1789 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1790 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1792 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1793 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1795 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1796 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1797 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1798 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1800 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1802 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1806 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1807 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1809 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1810 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1812 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1813 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1815 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1816 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1818 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1819 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1821 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1823 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1824 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1825 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1828 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1830 ** Build-related bug fixes
1832 installing .mo files would fail
1835 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1839 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1841 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1844 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1848 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1849 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1853 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1855 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1856 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1858 ** Deprecated options
1860 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1861 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1863 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1867 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1869 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1870 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1871 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1872 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1874 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1877 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1883 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1888 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1890 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1892 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1893 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1894 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1896 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1897 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1898 problematic usages. These include:
1900 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1901 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1902 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1903 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1904 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1905 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1906 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1907 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1908 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1910 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1911 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1913 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1914 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1915 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1916 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1918 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1919 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1920 between binary and text files.
1922 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1926 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1930 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1931 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1933 head tac tail tee tr
1934 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1936 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1937 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1939 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1940 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1941 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1943 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1945 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1947 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1948 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1949 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1953 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1955 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1956 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1958 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1959 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1960 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1964 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1965 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1969 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1970 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1971 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1975 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1976 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1980 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1982 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1984 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1988 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1989 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1990 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1992 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1993 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1994 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1995 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1996 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1998 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2002 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2003 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2004 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2006 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2008 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2009 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2010 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2011 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2013 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2015 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2016 rather than silently wrapping around.
2018 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2019 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2021 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2022 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2024 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2025 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2026 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2027 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2029 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2031 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2033 ** Improved robustness
2035 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2036 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2037 no matter how large the result.
2039 ** Improved portability
2041 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2042 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2044 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2046 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2047 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2048 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2050 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2051 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2055 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2056 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2058 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2060 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2061 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2062 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2063 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2065 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2066 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2068 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2069 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2070 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2072 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2074 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2075 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2077 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2078 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2080 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2082 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2083 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2085 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2086 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2088 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2089 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2090 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2092 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2094 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2096 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2100 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2102 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2103 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2104 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2106 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2107 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2109 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2110 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2111 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2113 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2114 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2116 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2117 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2118 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2119 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2121 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2122 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2124 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2125 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2126 the file system does not support it.
2128 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2130 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2131 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2133 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2135 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2136 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2138 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2139 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2140 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2141 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2143 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2144 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2147 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2148 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2149 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2150 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2152 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2153 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2154 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2155 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2157 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2158 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2160 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2162 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2163 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2164 reporting incorrect results.
2168 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2169 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2171 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2174 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2176 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2177 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2179 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2180 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2182 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2185 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2186 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2187 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2188 the file name does not look like a page range.
2190 printf has several changes:
2192 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2193 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2195 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2196 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2197 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2199 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2200 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2203 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2204 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2206 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2207 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2209 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2211 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2212 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2214 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2216 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2218 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2219 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2220 when first encountering the directory.
2224 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2225 output; POSIX requires this.
2227 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2228 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2230 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2232 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2233 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2235 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2236 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2238 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2239 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2240 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2241 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2242 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2243 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2244 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2246 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2247 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2248 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2250 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2251 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2253 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2255 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2257 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2258 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2259 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2260 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2262 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2266 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2267 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2268 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2269 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2270 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2272 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2273 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2274 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2276 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2277 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2279 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2280 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2282 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2283 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2284 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2285 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2286 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2288 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2289 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2291 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2292 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2294 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2296 nocreat do not create the output file
2297 excl fail if the output file already exists
2298 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2299 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2301 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2303 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2304 direct use direct I/O for data
2305 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2306 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2307 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2308 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2309 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2311 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2313 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2314 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2317 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2318 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2319 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2320 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2321 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2322 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2324 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2325 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2327 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2330 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2332 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2334 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2335 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2337 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2338 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2339 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2341 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2342 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2343 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2345 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2347 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2348 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2350 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2351 for compatibility with bash.
2353 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2355 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2356 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2357 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2358 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2360 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2361 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2363 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2364 ls supports TABSIZE.
2365 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2366 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2367 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2369 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2372 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2374 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2375 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2376 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2377 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2378 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2379 an offset, not as a file name.
2381 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2382 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2384 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2385 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2387 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2388 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2390 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2391 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2392 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2394 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2395 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2397 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2398 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2402 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2404 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2406 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2410 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2411 or more arguments between partitions.
2413 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2414 holes in the destination.
2416 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2417 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2418 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2419 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2420 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2421 terminates immediately.
2423 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2425 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2427 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2428 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2429 not the empty string.
2431 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2432 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2436 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2437 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2438 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2441 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2448 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2452 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2453 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2455 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2456 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2458 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2459 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2460 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2463 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2467 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2468 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2470 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2471 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2473 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2474 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2475 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2477 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2479 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2482 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2484 ** Configuration option
2486 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2487 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2491 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2492 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2496 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2497 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2498 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2501 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2502 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2503 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2504 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2505 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2506 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2507 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2510 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2514 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2515 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2516 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2518 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2519 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2521 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2523 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2524 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2525 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2526 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2528 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2530 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2531 not just the ones that reference directories
2533 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2534 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2536 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2537 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2538 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2540 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2541 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2542 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2543 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2544 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2545 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2547 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2552 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2553 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2555 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2557 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2559 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2561 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2562 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2564 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2565 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2567 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2569 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2573 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2575 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2577 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2578 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2579 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2580 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2581 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2583 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2584 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2586 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2587 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2589 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2590 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2592 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2593 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2594 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2598 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2599 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2600 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2601 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2602 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2603 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2604 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2605 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2606 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2607 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2608 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2609 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2610 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2611 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2613 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2615 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2616 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2618 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2620 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2622 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2623 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2625 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2627 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2628 without a trailing newline.
2630 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2631 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2633 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2636 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2640 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2642 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2644 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2645 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2646 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2647 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2649 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2651 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2652 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2653 be printed without leading spaces.
2655 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2656 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2661 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2662 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2663 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2665 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2667 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2668 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2670 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2671 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2673 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2674 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2676 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2678 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2680 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2682 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2683 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2685 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2687 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2689 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2690 byte offsets are specified.
2693 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2696 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2699 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2700 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2701 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2702 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2703 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2704 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2705 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2706 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2707 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2708 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2709 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2710 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2711 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2712 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2713 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2714 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2715 directory where M has write access.
2716 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2717 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2718 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2721 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2722 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2723 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2724 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2725 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2726 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2727 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2728 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2729 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2730 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2731 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2732 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2733 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2734 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2735 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2736 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2737 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2738 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2739 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2740 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2741 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2742 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2743 appeared one additional time.
2745 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2746 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2747 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2748 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2751 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2752 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2753 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2754 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2755 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2756 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2757 if there were more than 338.
2759 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2760 - false --help now exits nonzero
2763 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2764 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2765 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2766 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2769 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2770 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2771 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2772 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2773 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2776 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2777 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2778 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2779 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2780 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2781 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2782 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2785 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2786 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2787 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2788 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2789 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2790 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2792 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2793 under certain unusual conditions
2794 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2795 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2798 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2799 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2800 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2801 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2802 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2803 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2804 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2805 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2806 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2807 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2808 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2809 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2810 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2811 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2812 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2813 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2816 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2817 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2820 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2821 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2822 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2823 involving hard-linked directories
2824 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2825 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2826 character-special and block files
2829 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2830 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2831 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2832 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2833 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2834 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2835 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2836 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2837 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2839 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2840 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2841 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2842 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2843 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2844 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2845 specified on the command line.
2846 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2847 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2848 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2849 the first file untouched.
2850 * readlink: new program
2851 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2852 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2853 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2854 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2855 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2856 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2859 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2860 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2861 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2862 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2863 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2864 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2865 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2866 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2867 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2868 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2869 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2870 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2872 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2873 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2874 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2876 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2877 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2878 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2879 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2880 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2881 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2882 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2883 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2886 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2887 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2890 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2891 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2892 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2893 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2894 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2895 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2896 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2899 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2900 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2902 ========================================================================
2903 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2904 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2907 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2909 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2910 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2911 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2912 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2913 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2914 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2915 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2916 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2917 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2918 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2919 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2920 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2922 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2923 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2924 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2925 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2927 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2930 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2932 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2933 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2934 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2935 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2936 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2937 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2938 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2941 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2942 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2943 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2944 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2945 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2946 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2947 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2948 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2949 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2950 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2951 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2952 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2953 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2954 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2955 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2956 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2958 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2959 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2961 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2962 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2963 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2964 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2965 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2966 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2968 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2969 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2970 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2971 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2972 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2973 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2974 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2976 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2977 the source files in the following example:
2978 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2979 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2980 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2981 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2982 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2983 links between source files with --preserve=links
2984 * cp accepts new options:
2985 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2986 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2987 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2988 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2989 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2990 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2991 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2992 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2993 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2995 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2996 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2997 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2998 even though it's older than dest.
2999 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3000 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3001 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3002 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3003 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3005 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3006 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3007 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3008 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3009 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3010 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3011 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3013 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3014 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3015 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3017 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3018 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3019 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3020 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3021 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3022 This is the default.
3024 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3025 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3026 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3027 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3028 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3030 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3033 ========================================================================
3034 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3035 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3038 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3039 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3041 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3042 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3043 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3044 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3045 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3047 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3048 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3049 that specifies a non-directory
3052 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3053 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3054 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3055 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3056 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3057 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3058 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3059 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3060 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3061 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3062 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3063 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3064 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3065 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3066 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3067 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3068 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3069 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3070 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3071 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3072 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3073 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3074 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3075 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3077 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3078 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3079 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3081 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3083 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3084 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3086 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3087 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3088 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3089 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3090 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3092 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3093 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3094 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3095 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3096 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3098 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3100 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3101 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3102 * still more portability fixes
3103 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3104 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3106 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3108 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3110 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3112 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3113 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3114 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3115 there is any time remaining
3116 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3118 ========================================================================
3119 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3120 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3122 This package began as the union of the following:
3123 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3125 ========================================================================
3127 Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3129 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3130 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3131 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3132 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3133 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3134 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.