1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
8 when the source file doesn't have write access.
9 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
11 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
12 to accommodate leap seconds.
14 ** Changes in behavior
16 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
17 environment variable is set.
21 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
22 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
23 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
25 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
26 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
27 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
28 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
29 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
30 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
33 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
34 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
37 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
41 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
42 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
43 and libraries tested at configure time.
44 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
46 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
47 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
49 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
50 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
52 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
53 printing a summary to stderr.
54 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
56 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
57 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
58 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
60 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
61 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
63 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
64 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
65 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
66 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
68 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
69 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
70 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
71 which is relatively unusual.
72 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
74 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
75 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
76 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
77 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
78 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
79 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
80 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
84 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
85 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
86 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
87 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
88 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
92 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
93 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
95 ** Changes in behavior
97 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
98 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
99 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
100 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
101 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
104 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
108 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
109 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
111 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
112 before data copying has started.
114 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
115 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
117 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
118 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
119 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
120 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
122 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
123 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
124 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
125 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
127 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
132 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
133 for its standard streams.
135 ** Changes in behavior
137 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
138 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
139 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
140 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
141 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
142 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
144 ** Deprecated options
146 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
147 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
151 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
153 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
154 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
157 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
159 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
160 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
162 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
163 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
166 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
170 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
171 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
172 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
173 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
175 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
176 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
177 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
178 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
179 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
184 make check: two tests have been corrected
188 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
189 inherited from gnulib.
192 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
196 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
197 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
198 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
199 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
201 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
202 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
204 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
206 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
207 systems without xattr support.
209 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
210 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
211 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
213 ** Changes in behavior
215 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
216 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
217 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
218 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
220 ** Improved robustness
222 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
223 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
224 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
225 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
226 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
227 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
228 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
229 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
230 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
234 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
235 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
237 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
238 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
239 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
240 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
241 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
244 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
248 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
249 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
250 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
254 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
255 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
256 data was read, or on process exit.
257 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
259 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
260 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
261 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
262 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
264 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
265 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
266 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
267 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
269 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
270 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
272 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
273 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
275 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
276 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
277 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
279 ** Changes in behavior
281 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
282 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
283 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
285 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
286 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
288 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
289 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
290 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
293 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
297 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
299 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
300 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
301 install: Never copies xattrs
303 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
304 from overwriting any existing destination file
306 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
307 mode where this feature is available.
309 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
310 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
311 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
312 do not modify the destination at all.
314 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
316 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
320 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
321 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
323 cp uses much less memory in some situations
325 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
326 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
328 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
329 processing the first file name
331 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
332 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
333 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
334 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
336 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
337 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
339 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
340 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
343 ** Changes in behavior
345 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
346 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
348 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
349 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
350 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
352 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
353 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
355 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
357 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
358 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
359 is still marked with a '+'.
362 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
366 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
367 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
371 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
372 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
373 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
374 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
375 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
376 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
378 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
379 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
381 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
382 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
384 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
386 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
387 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
388 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
390 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
391 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
393 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
394 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
395 used to factor large numbers.
397 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
400 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
402 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
404 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
405 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
407 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
408 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
409 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
410 maximum command-line (argv) length.
412 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
413 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
414 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
416 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
417 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
421 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
423 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
424 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
426 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
427 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
429 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
431 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
432 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
436 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
437 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
438 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
440 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
442 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
443 no matter how many files are in a given directory
445 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
446 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
447 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
449 ** Changes in behavior
451 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
452 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
455 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
459 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
461 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
462 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
463 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
465 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
466 with no USERNAME argument.
468 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
469 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
470 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
472 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
473 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
474 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
475 number of fields for some inputs.
477 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
478 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
480 ** Changes in behavior
482 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
483 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
486 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
490 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
492 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
493 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
494 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
495 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
497 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
498 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
500 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
501 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
503 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
504 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
506 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
507 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
508 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
509 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
511 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
512 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
513 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
514 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
515 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
516 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
518 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
519 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
521 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
522 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
523 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
525 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
526 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
528 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
529 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
531 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
532 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
533 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
534 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
536 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
537 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
539 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
540 in more cases when a directory is empty.
542 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
543 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
544 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
548 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
549 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
551 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
552 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
553 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
554 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
558 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
559 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
561 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
563 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
567 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
568 which have negative errno values.
572 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
576 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
580 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
581 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
584 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
588 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
589 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
590 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
592 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
593 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
594 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
595 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
599 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
600 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
601 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
602 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
605 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
609 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
611 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
612 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
613 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
616 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
620 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
621 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
623 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
625 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
627 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
629 ** Programs no longer installed by default
633 ** Changes in behavior
635 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
636 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
638 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
639 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
641 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
642 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
643 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
647 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
648 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
649 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
650 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
651 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
652 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
653 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
654 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
655 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
656 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
657 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
659 The following commands and options now support the standard size
660 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
661 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
664 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
667 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
668 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
669 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
671 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
672 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
673 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
678 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
679 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
680 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
681 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
683 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
684 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
685 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
686 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
687 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
688 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
689 of "make check" fail.
691 ** Remove deprecated options
693 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
694 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
695 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
696 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
697 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
699 ** Improved robustness
701 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
702 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
703 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
704 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
705 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
706 loss of the contents of a/f.
708 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
709 in its 35-colon command-line argument
713 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
714 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
715 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
717 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
718 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
719 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
720 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
722 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
723 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
724 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
725 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
726 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
727 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
728 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
729 destination is a symlink.
731 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
733 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
734 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
736 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
737 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
739 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
741 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
742 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
744 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
745 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
747 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
750 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
751 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
753 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
754 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
756 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
757 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
758 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
759 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
761 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
762 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
763 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
765 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
766 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
767 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
769 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
770 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
771 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
772 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
774 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
775 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
776 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
778 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
779 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
781 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
782 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
784 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
786 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
787 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
788 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
790 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
791 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
793 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
794 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
796 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
797 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
799 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
800 [present in the original version]
803 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
807 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
809 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
810 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
811 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
813 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
814 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
816 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
820 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
821 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
823 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
824 support but with insufficient /proc support.
826 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
827 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
829 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
830 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
831 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
832 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
833 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
834 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
836 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
837 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
840 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
841 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
843 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
846 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
847 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
848 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
850 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
851 directory is unreadable.
853 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
854 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
855 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
857 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
858 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
859 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
860 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
861 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
864 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
865 Before it would print nothing.
867 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
869 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
870 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
871 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
872 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
873 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
874 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
875 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
876 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
878 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
882 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
883 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
884 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
886 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
887 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
888 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
889 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
892 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
896 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
897 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
898 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
899 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
900 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
901 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
902 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
904 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
905 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
906 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
907 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
908 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
909 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
910 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
911 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
913 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
914 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
915 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
918 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
922 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
923 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
925 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
926 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
927 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
929 ** Improved robustness
931 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
932 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
933 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
936 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
940 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
941 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
942 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
943 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
944 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
946 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
950 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
953 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
957 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
958 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
959 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
960 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
962 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
963 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
965 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
966 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
967 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
970 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
972 ** Improved robustness
974 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
975 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
977 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
978 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
979 or NFS-mounted partition.
981 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
982 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
986 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
987 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
988 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
989 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
990 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
991 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
993 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
994 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
996 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
997 or neglect to report file removal.
999 For the "groups" command:
1001 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1002 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1004 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1006 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1008 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1012 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1013 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1016 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1018 ** Changes in behavior
1020 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1021 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1022 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1023 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1025 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1026 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1027 a final `./' or `../' component.
1029 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1030 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1031 this only for pipes.
1033 ** Infrastructure changes
1035 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1036 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1037 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1038 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1042 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1043 name is "." or "..".
1045 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1046 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1047 dirent.d_type support.
1049 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1050 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1052 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1053 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1054 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1055 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1058 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1060 ** Changes in behavior
1062 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1066 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1067 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1071 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1072 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1073 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1075 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1076 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1078 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1079 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1081 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1083 ** Improved robustness
1085 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1086 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1087 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1089 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1090 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1093 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1094 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1096 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1097 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1099 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1100 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1102 ** Changes in behavior
1104 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1105 where the two are distinct.
1107 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1108 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1109 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1110 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1111 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1112 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1113 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1114 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1115 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1116 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1117 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1118 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1119 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1120 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1121 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1122 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1123 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1125 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1126 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1127 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1129 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1130 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1131 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1132 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1135 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1136 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1140 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1141 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1142 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1143 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1145 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1146 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1147 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1149 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1150 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1151 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1152 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1153 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1156 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1157 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1159 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1160 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1161 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1162 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1164 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1165 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1166 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1168 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1169 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1170 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1171 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1173 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1174 and sticky) with the -m option.
1176 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1177 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1178 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1179 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1180 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1182 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1183 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1185 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1189 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1190 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1191 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1192 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1194 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1196 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1198 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1199 silently ignoring one of them.
1201 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1202 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1203 containing this change was 5.92.
1205 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1206 automatically newline terminated.
1208 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1209 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1210 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1211 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1214 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1215 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1216 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1219 ** Scheduled for removal
1221 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1222 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1224 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1225 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1226 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1227 command to unlink a directory.
1229 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1230 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1231 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1232 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1236 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1237 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1238 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1239 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1240 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1241 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1245 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1246 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1248 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1250 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1251 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1252 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1254 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1255 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1258 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1259 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1261 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1262 list directories before files.
1264 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1265 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1266 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1267 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1270 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1272 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1274 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1275 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1276 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1278 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1279 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1283 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1284 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1285 usually printing nothing.
1287 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1289 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1290 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1291 them with hard-linked directories.
1293 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1294 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1295 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1297 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1298 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1299 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1301 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1304 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1305 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1307 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1308 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1310 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1311 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1313 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1314 all command-line arguments.
1316 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1318 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1320 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1321 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1323 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1325 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1326 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1327 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1328 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1329 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1331 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1332 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1334 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1335 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1336 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1337 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1339 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1341 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1345 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1346 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1348 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1349 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1351 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1352 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1354 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1355 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1357 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1358 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1360 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1362 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1363 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1364 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1367 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1369 ** Build-related bug fixes
1371 installing .mo files would fail
1374 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1378 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1380 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1383 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1387 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1388 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1392 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1394 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1395 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1397 ** Deprecated options
1399 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1400 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1402 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1406 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1408 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1409 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1410 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1411 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1413 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1416 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1422 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1427 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1429 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1431 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1432 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1433 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1435 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1436 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1437 problematic usages. These include:
1439 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1440 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1441 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1442 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1443 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1444 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1445 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1446 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1447 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1449 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1450 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1452 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1453 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1454 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1455 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1457 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1458 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1459 between binary and text files.
1461 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1465 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1469 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1470 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1472 head tac tail tee tr
1473 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1475 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1476 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1478 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1479 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1480 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1482 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1484 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1486 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1487 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1488 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1492 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1494 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1495 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1497 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1498 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1499 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1503 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1504 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1508 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1509 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1510 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1514 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1515 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1519 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1521 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1523 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1527 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1528 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1529 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1531 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1532 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1533 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1534 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1535 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1537 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
1541 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
1542 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
1543 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
1545 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
1547 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
1548 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
1549 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
1550 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
1552 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
1554 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
1555 rather than silently wrapping around.
1557 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
1558 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
1560 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
1561 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
1563 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
1564 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
1565 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
1566 file /tmp/a/b/file".
1568 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
1570 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
1572 ** Improved robustness
1574 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
1575 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
1576 no matter how large the result.
1578 ** Improved portability
1580 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
1581 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
1583 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
1585 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
1586 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
1587 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
1589 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
1590 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
1594 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
1595 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
1597 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
1599 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
1600 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
1601 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
1602 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
1604 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
1605 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
1607 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
1608 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
1609 categories if not specified by dircolors.
1611 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
1613 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
1614 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
1616 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
1617 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
1619 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
1621 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
1622 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
1624 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
1625 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
1627 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
1628 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
1629 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
1631 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
1633 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
1635 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
1639 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
1641 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
1642 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
1643 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
1645 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
1646 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
1648 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
1649 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
1650 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
1652 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
1653 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
1655 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
1656 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
1657 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
1658 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
1660 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
1661 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
1663 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
1664 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
1665 the file system does not support it.
1667 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
1669 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
1670 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
1672 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
1674 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
1675 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
1677 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
1678 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
1679 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
1680 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
1682 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
1683 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
1686 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
1687 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
1688 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
1689 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
1691 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
1692 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
1693 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
1694 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
1696 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
1697 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
1699 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
1701 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
1702 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
1703 reporting incorrect results.
1707 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
1708 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
1710 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
1713 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
1715 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
1716 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
1718 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
1719 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
1721 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
1724 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
1725 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
1726 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
1727 the file name does not look like a page range.
1729 printf has several changes:
1731 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
1732 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
1734 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
1735 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
1736 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
1738 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
1739 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
1742 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
1743 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
1745 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
1746 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
1748 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
1750 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
1751 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
1753 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
1755 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
1757 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
1758 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
1759 when first encountering the directory.
1763 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
1764 output; POSIX requires this.
1766 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
1767 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
1769 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
1771 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
1772 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
1774 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
1775 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
1777 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
1778 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
1779 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
1780 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
1781 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
1782 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
1783 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
1785 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
1786 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
1787 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
1789 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
1790 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
1792 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
1794 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
1796 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
1797 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
1798 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
1799 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
1801 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
1805 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
1806 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
1807 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
1808 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
1809 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
1811 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
1812 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
1813 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
1815 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
1816 is longer than PATH_MAX.
1818 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
1819 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
1821 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
1822 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
1823 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
1824 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
1825 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
1827 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
1828 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
1830 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
1831 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
1833 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
1835 nocreat do not create the output file
1836 excl fail if the output file already exists
1837 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
1838 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
1840 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
1842 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
1843 direct use direct I/O for data
1844 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
1845 sync likewise, but also for metadata
1846 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
1847 nofollow do not follow symlinks
1848 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
1850 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
1852 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
1853 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
1856 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
1857 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
1858 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
1859 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
1860 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
1861 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
1863 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1864 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1866 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
1869 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
1871 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
1873 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
1874 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
1876 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
1877 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
1878 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
1880 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
1881 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
1882 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
1884 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
1886 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
1887 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
1889 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
1890 for compatibility with bash.
1892 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
1894 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
1895 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
1896 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
1897 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
1899 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
1900 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
1902 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
1903 ls supports TABSIZE.
1904 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
1905 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
1906 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
1908 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
1911 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
1913 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
1914 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
1915 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
1916 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
1917 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
1918 an offset, not as a file name.
1920 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
1921 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
1923 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
1924 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
1926 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
1927 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
1929 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
1930 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
1931 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
1933 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
1934 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
1936 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
1937 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
1941 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
1943 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
1945 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
1949 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
1950 or more arguments between partitions.
1952 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
1953 holes in the destination.
1955 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
1956 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
1957 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
1958 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
1959 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
1960 terminates immediately.
1962 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
1964 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
1966 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
1967 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
1968 not the empty string.
1970 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
1971 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
1975 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
1976 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
1977 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
1980 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
1987 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
1991 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
1992 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
1994 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
1995 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
1997 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
1998 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
1999 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2002 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2006 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2007 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2009 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2010 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2012 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2013 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2014 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2016 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2018 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2021 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2023 ** Configuration option
2025 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2026 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2030 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2031 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2035 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2036 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2037 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2040 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2041 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2042 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2043 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2044 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2045 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2046 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2049 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2053 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2054 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2055 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2057 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2058 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2060 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2062 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2063 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2064 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2065 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2067 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2069 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2070 not just the ones that reference directories
2072 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2073 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2075 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2076 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2077 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2079 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2080 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2081 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2082 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2083 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2084 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2086 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2091 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2092 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2094 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2096 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2098 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2100 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2101 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2103 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2104 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2106 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2108 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2112 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2114 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2116 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2117 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2118 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2119 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2120 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2122 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2123 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2125 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2126 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2128 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2129 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2131 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2132 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2133 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2137 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2138 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2139 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2140 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2141 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2142 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2143 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2144 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2145 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2146 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2147 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2148 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2149 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2150 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2152 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2154 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2155 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2157 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2159 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2161 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2162 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2164 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2166 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2167 without a trailing newline.
2169 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2170 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2172 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2175 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2179 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2181 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2183 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2184 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2185 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2186 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2188 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2190 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2191 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2192 be printed without leading spaces.
2194 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2195 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2200 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2201 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2202 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2204 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2206 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2207 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2209 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2210 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2212 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2213 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2215 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2217 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2219 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2221 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2222 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2224 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2226 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2228 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2229 byte offsets are specified.
2232 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2235 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2238 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2239 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2240 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2241 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2242 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2243 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2244 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2245 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2246 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2247 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2248 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2249 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2250 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2251 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2252 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2253 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2254 directory where M has write access.
2255 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2256 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2257 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2260 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2261 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2262 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2263 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2264 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2265 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2266 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2267 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2268 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2269 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2270 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2271 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2272 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2273 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2274 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2275 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2276 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2277 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2278 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2279 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2280 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2281 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2282 appeared one additional time.
2284 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2285 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2286 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2287 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2290 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2291 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2292 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2293 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2294 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2295 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2296 if there were more than 338.
2298 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2299 - false --help now exits nonzero
2302 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2303 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2304 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2305 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2308 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2309 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2310 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2311 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2312 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2315 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2316 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2317 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2318 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2319 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2320 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2321 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2324 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2325 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2326 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2327 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2328 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2329 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2331 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2332 under certain unusual conditions
2333 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2334 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2337 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2338 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2339 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2340 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2341 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2342 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2343 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2344 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2345 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2346 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2347 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2348 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2349 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2350 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2351 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2352 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2355 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2356 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2359 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2360 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2361 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2362 involving hard-linked directories
2363 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2364 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2365 character-special and block files
2368 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2369 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2370 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2371 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2372 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2373 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2374 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2375 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2376 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2378 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2379 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2380 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2381 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2382 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2383 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2384 specified on the command line.
2385 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2386 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2387 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2388 the first file untouched.
2389 * readlink: new program
2390 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2391 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2392 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2393 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2394 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2395 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2398 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2399 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2400 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2401 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2402 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2403 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2404 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2405 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2406 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2407 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2408 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2409 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2411 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2412 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2413 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2415 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2416 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2417 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2418 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2419 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2420 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2421 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2422 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2425 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2426 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2429 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2430 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2431 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2432 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2433 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2434 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2435 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2438 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2439 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2441 ========================================================================
2442 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2443 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2446 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2448 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2449 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2450 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2451 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2452 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2453 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2454 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2455 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2456 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2457 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2458 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2459 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2461 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2462 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2463 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2464 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2466 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2469 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2471 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2472 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2473 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2474 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2475 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2476 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2477 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2480 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2481 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2482 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2483 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2484 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2485 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2486 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2487 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2488 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2489 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2490 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2491 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2492 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2493 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2494 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2495 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2497 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2498 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2500 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2501 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2502 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2503 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2504 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2505 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2507 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2508 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2509 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2510 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2511 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2512 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2513 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2515 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2516 the source files in the following example:
2517 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2518 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2519 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2520 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2521 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2522 links between source files with --preserve=links
2523 * cp accepts new options:
2524 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2525 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2526 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2527 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2528 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2529 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2530 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2531 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2532 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2534 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2535 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2536 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2537 even though it's older than dest.
2538 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
2539 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
2540 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
2541 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
2542 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
2544 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
2545 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
2546 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
2547 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
2548 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
2549 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
2550 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
2552 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
2553 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
2554 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
2556 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
2557 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
2558 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
2559 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
2560 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
2561 This is the default.
2563 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
2564 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
2565 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
2566 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
2567 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
2569 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
2572 ========================================================================
2573 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
2574 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2577 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
2578 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
2580 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2581 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
2582 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
2583 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
2584 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
2586 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
2587 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
2588 that specifies a non-directory
2591 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
2592 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
2593 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
2594 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
2595 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2596 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
2597 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
2598 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2599 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
2600 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
2601 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
2602 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
2603 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
2604 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
2605 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
2606 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
2607 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
2608 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
2609 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
2610 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
2611 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
2612 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
2613 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
2614 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
2616 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
2617 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
2618 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
2620 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
2622 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
2623 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
2625 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
2626 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
2627 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
2628 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
2629 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
2631 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
2632 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
2633 required support; from Bruno Haible.
2634 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
2635 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
2637 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
2639 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
2640 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
2641 * still more portability fixes
2642 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
2643 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2645 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
2647 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
2649 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
2651 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
2652 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
2653 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
2654 there is any time remaining
2655 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
2657 ========================================================================
2658 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2659 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
2661 This package began as the union of the following:
2662 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
2664 ========================================================================
2666 Copyright (C) 2001-2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
2668 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
2669 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
2670 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
2671 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
2672 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
2673 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.