1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 realpath: print resolved file names.
11 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
12 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
14 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
15 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
17 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
18 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
19 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
20 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
21 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
22 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
24 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
25 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
26 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
28 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
29 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
30 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
32 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
34 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
35 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
37 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
38 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
39 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
41 ** Changes in behavior
43 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
44 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
45 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
46 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
47 usually-short referent instead.
49 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
50 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
51 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
52 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
55 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
59 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
60 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
61 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
63 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
64 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
66 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
67 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
71 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
72 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
74 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
75 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
76 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
77 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
79 ** Changes in behavior
81 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
82 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
83 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
87 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
88 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
89 only .tar.xz files is enough.
92 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
96 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
97 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
98 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
100 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
101 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
103 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
104 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
105 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
106 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
107 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
109 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
110 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
111 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
112 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
113 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
114 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
115 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
116 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
118 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
119 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
121 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
122 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
124 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
125 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
127 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
128 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
129 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
131 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
132 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
133 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
134 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
136 ** Changes in behavior
138 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
139 when -v or -c specified.
141 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
142 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
146 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
147 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
148 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
149 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
150 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
152 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
153 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
154 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
156 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
157 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
158 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
159 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
160 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
161 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
162 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
164 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
165 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
166 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
170 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
171 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
173 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
176 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
177 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
179 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
180 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
182 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
183 For example `shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2` no longer exhausts memory.
185 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
187 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
191 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
192 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
194 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
197 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
201 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
202 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
204 ** Changes in behavior
206 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
207 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
208 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
209 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
210 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
211 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
213 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
214 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
215 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
219 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
222 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
226 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
227 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
228 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
230 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
231 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
232 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
234 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
235 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
236 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
238 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
239 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
241 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
242 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
244 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
245 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
247 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
248 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
252 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
253 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
254 processed portion thereof.
256 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
257 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
259 ** Changes in behavior
261 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
262 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
263 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
265 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
266 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
267 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
269 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
270 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
272 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
273 Use --preserve-context instead.
275 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
278 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
282 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
283 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
284 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
285 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
286 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
288 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
289 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
291 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
292 reject file names invalid for that file system.
294 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
295 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
299 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
300 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
301 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
302 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
303 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
304 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
305 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
306 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
308 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
309 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
310 the same number of fields are output for each line.
312 ** Changes in behavior
314 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
315 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
316 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
319 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
323 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
324 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
325 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
328 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
332 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
333 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
335 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
336 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
338 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
339 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
341 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
342 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
343 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
344 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
346 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
347 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
349 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
350 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
351 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
353 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
355 ** Changes in behavior
357 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
358 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
359 to the number of available processors.
363 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
366 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
370 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
371 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
372 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
373 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
375 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
376 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
377 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
379 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
380 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
382 ** Changes in behavior
384 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
385 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
387 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
388 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
389 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
390 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
391 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
392 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
394 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
395 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
396 the same way as the others.
399 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
403 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
404 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
405 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
407 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
408 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
410 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
411 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
412 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
414 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
415 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
417 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
418 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
420 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
421 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
422 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
424 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
425 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
426 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
427 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
431 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
432 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
434 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
437 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
438 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
440 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
442 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
443 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
444 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
446 ** Changes in behavior
448 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
449 rather than its aliased target.
451 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
452 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
453 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
455 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
456 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
457 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
458 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
459 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
460 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
461 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
462 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
464 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
466 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
468 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
469 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
472 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
473 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
474 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
475 control like taskset for example.
477 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
479 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
480 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
481 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
482 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
483 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
484 includes %C when context information is available.
486 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
487 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
488 rather than a file system attribute.
490 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
491 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
492 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
493 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
495 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
496 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
497 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
499 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
500 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
501 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
504 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
508 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
509 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
511 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
513 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
514 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
516 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
517 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
518 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
519 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
521 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
522 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
523 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
527 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
528 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
530 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
531 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
532 duration after the initial signal was sent.
534 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
535 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
536 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
537 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
538 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
539 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
540 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
541 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
542 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
544 ** Changes in behavior
546 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
547 sequence when it would be a no-op.
549 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
550 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
553 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
557 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
558 of available processors, which may not have been the case
559 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
560 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
564 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
565 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
567 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
568 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
569 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
570 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
572 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
573 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
574 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
577 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
581 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
582 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
583 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
585 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
586 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
587 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
589 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
590 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
592 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
593 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
594 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
595 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
597 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
598 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
599 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
601 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
602 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
603 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
604 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
606 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
607 renamed-aside and then recreated.
608 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
610 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
611 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
612 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
613 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
615 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
616 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
617 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
619 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
620 processes will not intersperse their output.
621 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
624 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
628 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
629 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
631 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
632 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
634 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
635 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
636 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
637 the presence of the empty string argument.
638 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
640 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
641 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
642 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
643 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
645 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
646 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
648 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
649 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
650 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
652 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
653 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
654 and with a malicious user on the same system
655 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
656 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
659 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
663 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
664 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
665 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
667 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
668 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
669 offending directory and all "contents."
671 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
672 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
673 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
675 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
676 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
677 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
679 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
680 processes will not intersperse their output.
681 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
682 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
684 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
685 output the name of the file to stdout.
686 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
688 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
689 call fails with errno == EACCES.
690 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
692 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
693 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
696 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
697 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
698 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
700 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
701 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
702 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
703 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
704 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
705 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
707 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
708 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
709 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
710 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
712 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
713 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
715 ** Changes in behavior
717 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
718 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
719 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
720 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
721 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
723 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
724 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
725 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
726 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
728 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
730 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
731 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
732 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
733 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
734 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
738 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
742 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
743 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
745 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
746 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
748 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
749 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
750 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
752 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
753 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
756 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
760 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
761 when the source file doesn't have write access.
762 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
764 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
765 to accommodate leap seconds.
766 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
768 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
769 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
770 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
772 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
774 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
775 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
776 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
778 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
779 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
780 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
781 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
782 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
786 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
787 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
788 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
789 directory or a symlink to a directory.
791 ** Changes in behavior
793 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
794 environment variable is set.
796 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
797 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
798 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
802 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
803 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
804 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
805 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
807 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
808 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
809 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
810 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
814 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
815 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
816 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
818 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
819 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
820 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
821 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
822 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
823 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
826 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
827 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
830 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
834 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
835 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
836 and libraries tested at configure time.
837 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
839 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
840 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
842 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
843 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
845 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
846 printing a summary to stderr.
847 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
849 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
850 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
851 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
853 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
854 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
856 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
857 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
858 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
859 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
861 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
862 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
863 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
864 which is relatively unusual.
865 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
867 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
868 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
869 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
870 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
871 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
872 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
873 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
877 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
878 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
879 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
880 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
881 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
885 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
886 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
888 ** Changes in behavior
890 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
891 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
892 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
893 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
894 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
897 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
901 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
902 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
904 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
905 before data copying has started.
907 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
908 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
910 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
911 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
912 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
913 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
915 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
916 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
917 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
918 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
920 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
925 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
926 for its standard streams.
928 ** Changes in behavior
930 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
931 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
932 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
933 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
934 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
935 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
937 ** Deprecated options
939 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
940 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
944 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
946 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
947 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
950 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
952 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
953 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
955 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
956 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
959 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
963 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
964 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
965 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
966 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
968 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
969 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
970 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
971 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
972 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
977 make check: two tests have been corrected
981 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
982 inherited from gnulib.
985 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
989 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
990 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
991 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
992 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
994 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
995 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
997 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
999 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1000 systems without xattr support.
1002 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1003 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1004 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1006 ** Changes in behavior
1008 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1009 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1010 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1011 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1013 ** Improved robustness
1015 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1016 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1017 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1018 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1019 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1020 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1021 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1022 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1023 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1027 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1028 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1030 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1031 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1032 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1033 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1034 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1037 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1041 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1042 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1043 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1047 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1048 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1049 data was read, or on process exit.
1050 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1052 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1053 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1054 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1055 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1057 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1058 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1059 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1060 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1062 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1063 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1065 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1066 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1068 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1069 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1070 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1072 ** Changes in behavior
1074 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1075 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1076 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1078 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1079 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1081 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1082 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1083 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1086 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1090 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1092 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1093 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1094 install: Never copies xattrs
1096 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1097 from overwriting any existing destination file
1099 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1100 mode where this feature is available.
1102 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1103 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1104 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1105 do not modify the destination at all.
1107 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1109 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1113 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1114 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1116 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1118 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1119 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1121 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1122 processing the first file name
1124 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1125 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1126 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1127 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1129 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1130 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1132 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1133 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1136 ** Changes in behavior
1138 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1139 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1141 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1142 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1143 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1145 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1146 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1148 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1150 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1151 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1152 is still marked with a '+'.
1155 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1159 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1160 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1164 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1165 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1166 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1167 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1168 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1169 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1171 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1172 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1174 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1175 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1177 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1179 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1180 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1181 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1183 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1184 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1186 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1187 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1188 used to factor large numbers.
1190 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1193 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1195 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1197 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1198 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1200 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1201 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1202 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1203 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1205 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1206 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1207 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1209 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1210 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1214 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1216 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1217 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1219 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1220 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1222 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1224 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1225 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1229 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1230 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1231 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1233 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1235 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1236 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1237 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1239 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1240 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1241 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1243 ** Changes in behavior
1245 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1246 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1249 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1253 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1254 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1255 'futimens' system calls.
1259 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1261 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1262 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1263 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1265 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1266 with no USERNAME argument.
1268 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1269 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1270 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1272 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1273 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1274 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1275 number of fields for some inputs.
1277 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1278 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1280 ** Changes in behavior
1282 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1283 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1286 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1290 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1292 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1293 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1294 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1295 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1297 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1298 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1300 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1301 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1303 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1304 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1306 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1307 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1308 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1309 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1311 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1312 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1313 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1314 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1315 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1316 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1318 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1319 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1321 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1322 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1323 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1325 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1326 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1328 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1329 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1331 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1332 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1333 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1334 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1336 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1337 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1339 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1340 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1342 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1343 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1344 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1348 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1349 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1351 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1352 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1353 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1354 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1358 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1359 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1361 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1363 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1367 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1368 which have negative errno values.
1372 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1376 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1380 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1381 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1384 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1388 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1389 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1390 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1392 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1393 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1394 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1395 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1399 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1400 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1401 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1402 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1405 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1409 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1411 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1412 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1413 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1416 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1420 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1421 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1423 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1425 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1427 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1429 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1433 ** Changes in behavior
1435 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1436 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1438 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1439 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1441 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1442 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1443 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1447 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1448 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1449 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1450 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1451 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1452 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1453 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1454 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1455 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1456 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1457 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1459 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1460 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1461 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1464 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1467 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1468 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1469 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1471 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1472 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1473 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1476 ** New build options
1478 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1479 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1480 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1481 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1483 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1484 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1485 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1486 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1487 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1488 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1489 of "make check" fail.
1491 ** Remove deprecated options
1493 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1494 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1495 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1496 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1497 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1499 ** Improved robustness
1501 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1502 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1503 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1504 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1505 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1506 loss of the contents of a/f.
1508 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1509 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1513 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1514 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1515 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1517 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1518 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1519 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1520 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1522 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1523 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1524 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1525 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1526 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1527 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1528 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1529 destination is a symlink.
1531 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1533 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1534 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1536 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1537 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1539 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1541 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1542 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1544 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1545 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1547 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1550 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1551 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1553 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1554 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1556 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1557 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1558 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1559 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1561 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1562 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1563 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1565 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1566 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1567 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1569 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1570 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1571 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1572 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1574 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1575 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1576 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1578 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1579 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1581 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1582 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1584 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1586 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1587 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1588 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1590 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1591 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1593 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1594 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1596 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1597 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1599 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1600 [present in the original version]
1603 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1607 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1609 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1610 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1611 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1613 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1614 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1616 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1620 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1621 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1623 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1624 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1626 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1627 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1629 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1630 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1631 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1632 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1633 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1634 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1636 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1637 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1640 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1641 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1643 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1646 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1647 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1648 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1650 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1651 directory is unreadable.
1653 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1654 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1655 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1657 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1658 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1659 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1660 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1661 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1664 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1665 Before it would print nothing.
1667 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1669 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1670 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1671 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1672 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1673 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1674 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1675 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1676 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1678 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1682 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1683 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1684 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1686 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1687 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1688 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1689 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1692 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1696 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1697 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1698 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1699 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1700 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1701 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1702 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1704 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1705 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1706 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1707 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1708 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1709 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1710 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1711 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1713 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1714 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1715 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1718 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1722 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1723 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1725 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1726 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1727 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1729 ** Improved robustness
1731 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1732 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1733 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1736 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1740 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1741 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1742 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1743 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1744 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1746 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1750 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1753 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1757 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1758 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1759 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1760 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1762 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1763 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1765 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1766 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1767 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1770 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1772 ** Improved robustness
1774 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1775 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1777 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1778 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1779 or NFS-mounted partition.
1781 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1782 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1786 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1787 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1788 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1789 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1790 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1791 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1793 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1794 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1796 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1797 or neglect to report file removal.
1799 For the "groups" command:
1801 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1802 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1804 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1806 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1808 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1812 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1813 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1816 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1818 ** Changes in behavior
1820 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1821 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1822 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1823 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1825 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1826 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1827 a final `./' or `../' component.
1829 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1830 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1831 this only for pipes.
1833 ** Infrastructure changes
1835 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1836 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1837 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1838 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1842 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1843 name is "." or "..".
1845 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1846 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1847 dirent.d_type support.
1849 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1850 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1852 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1853 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1854 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1855 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1858 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1860 ** Changes in behavior
1862 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1866 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1867 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1871 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1872 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1873 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1875 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1876 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1878 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1879 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1881 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1883 ** Improved robustness
1885 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1886 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1887 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1889 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1890 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1893 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1894 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1896 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1897 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1899 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1900 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1902 ** Changes in behavior
1904 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1905 where the two are distinct.
1907 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1908 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1909 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1910 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1911 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1912 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1913 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1914 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1915 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1916 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1917 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1918 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1919 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1920 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1921 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1922 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1923 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1925 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1926 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1927 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1929 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1930 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1931 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1932 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1935 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1936 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1940 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1941 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1942 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1943 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1945 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1946 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1947 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1949 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1950 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1951 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1952 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1953 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1956 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1957 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1959 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1960 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1961 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1962 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1964 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1965 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1966 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1968 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1969 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1970 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1971 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1973 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1974 and sticky) with the -m option.
1976 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1977 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1978 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1979 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1980 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1982 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1983 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1985 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1989 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1990 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1991 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1992 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1994 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1996 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1998 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1999 silently ignoring one of them.
2001 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2002 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2003 containing this change was 5.92.
2005 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2006 automatically newline terminated.
2008 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2009 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2010 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2011 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2014 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2015 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2016 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2019 ** Scheduled for removal
2021 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2022 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2024 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2025 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2026 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2027 command to unlink a directory.
2029 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2030 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2031 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2032 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2036 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2037 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2038 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2039 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2040 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2041 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2045 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2046 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2048 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2050 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2051 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2052 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2054 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2055 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2058 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2059 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2061 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2062 list directories before files.
2064 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2065 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2066 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2067 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2070 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2072 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
2074 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2075 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2076 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2078 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2079 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2083 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2084 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2085 usually printing nothing.
2087 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2089 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2090 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2091 them with hard-linked directories.
2093 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2094 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2095 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2097 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2098 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2099 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2101 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2104 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2105 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2107 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2108 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2110 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2111 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2113 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2114 all command-line arguments.
2116 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2118 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2120 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2121 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2123 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2125 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2126 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2127 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2128 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2129 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2131 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2132 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2134 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2135 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2136 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2137 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2139 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2141 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2145 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2146 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2148 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2149 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2151 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
2152 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2154 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2155 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
2157 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2158 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2160 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2162 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2163 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2164 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2167 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2169 ** Build-related bug fixes
2171 installing .mo files would fail
2174 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2178 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2180 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2183 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2187 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2188 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2192 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2194 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2195 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2197 ** Deprecated options
2199 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2200 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
2202 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2206 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2208 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2209 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2210 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2211 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2213 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2216 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2222 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2227 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2229 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2231 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2232 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2233 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2235 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2236 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2237 problematic usages. These include:
2239 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2240 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2241 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2242 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2243 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2244 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2245 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2246 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2247 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2249 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2250 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2252 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2253 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2254 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2255 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2257 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2258 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2259 between binary and text files.
2261 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2265 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2269 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2270 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2272 head tac tail tee tr
2273 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2275 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2276 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2278 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2279 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2280 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2282 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2284 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2286 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2287 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2288 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2292 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2294 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2295 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2297 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2298 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2299 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2303 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2304 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2308 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2309 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2310 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2314 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2315 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2319 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2321 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2323 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2327 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2328 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2329 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2331 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2332 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2333 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2334 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2335 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2337 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2341 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2342 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2343 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2345 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2347 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2348 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2349 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2350 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2352 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2354 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2355 rather than silently wrapping around.
2357 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2358 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2360 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2361 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2363 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2364 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2365 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2366 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2368 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2370 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2372 ** Improved robustness
2374 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2375 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2376 no matter how large the result.
2378 ** Improved portability
2380 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2381 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2383 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2385 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2386 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2387 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2389 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2390 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2394 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2395 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2397 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2399 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2400 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2401 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2402 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2404 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2405 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2407 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2408 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2409 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2411 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2413 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2414 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2416 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2417 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2419 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2421 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2422 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2424 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2425 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2427 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2428 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2429 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2431 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2433 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2435 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2439 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2441 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2442 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2443 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2445 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2446 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2448 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2449 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2450 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2452 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2453 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2455 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2456 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2457 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2458 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2460 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2461 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2463 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2464 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2465 the file system does not support it.
2467 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2469 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2470 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2472 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2474 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2475 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2477 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2478 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2479 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2480 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2482 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2483 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2486 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2487 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2488 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2489 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2491 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2492 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2493 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2494 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2496 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2497 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2499 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2501 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2502 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2503 reporting incorrect results.
2507 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2508 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2510 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2513 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2515 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2516 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2518 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2519 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2521 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2524 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2525 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2526 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2527 the file name does not look like a page range.
2529 printf has several changes:
2531 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2532 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2534 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2535 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2536 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2538 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2539 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2542 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2543 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2545 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2546 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2548 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2550 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2551 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2553 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2555 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2557 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2558 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2559 when first encountering the directory.
2563 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2564 output; POSIX requires this.
2566 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2567 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2569 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2571 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2572 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2574 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2575 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2577 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2578 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2579 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2580 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2581 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2582 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2583 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2585 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2586 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2587 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2589 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2590 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2592 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2594 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2596 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2597 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2598 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2599 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2601 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2605 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2606 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2607 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2608 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2609 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2611 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2612 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2613 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2615 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2616 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2618 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2619 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2621 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2622 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2623 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2624 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2625 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2627 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2628 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2630 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2631 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2633 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2635 nocreat do not create the output file
2636 excl fail if the output file already exists
2637 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2638 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2640 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2642 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2643 direct use direct I/O for data
2644 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2645 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2646 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2647 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2648 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2650 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2652 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2653 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2656 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2657 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2658 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2659 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2660 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2661 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2663 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2664 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2666 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2669 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2671 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2673 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2674 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2676 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2677 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2678 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2680 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2681 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2682 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2684 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2686 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2687 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2689 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2690 for compatibility with bash.
2692 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2694 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2695 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2696 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2697 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2699 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2700 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2702 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2703 ls supports TABSIZE.
2704 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2705 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2706 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2708 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2711 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2713 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2714 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2715 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2716 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2717 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2718 an offset, not as a file name.
2720 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2721 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2723 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2724 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2726 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2727 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2729 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2730 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2731 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2733 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2734 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2736 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2737 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2741 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2743 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2745 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2749 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2750 or more arguments between partitions.
2752 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2753 holes in the destination.
2755 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2756 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2757 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2758 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2759 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2760 terminates immediately.
2762 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2764 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2766 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2767 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2768 not the empty string.
2770 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2771 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2775 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2776 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2777 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2780 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2787 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2791 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2792 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2794 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2795 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2797 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2798 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2799 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2802 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2806 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2807 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2809 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2810 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2812 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2813 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2814 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2816 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2818 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2821 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2823 ** Configuration option
2825 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2826 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2830 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2831 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2835 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2836 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2837 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2840 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2841 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2842 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2843 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2844 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2845 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2846 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2849 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2853 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2854 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2855 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2857 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2858 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2860 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2862 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2863 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2864 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2865 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2867 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2869 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2870 not just the ones that reference directories
2872 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2873 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2875 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2876 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2877 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2879 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2880 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2881 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2882 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2883 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2884 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2886 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2891 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2892 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2894 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2896 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2898 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2900 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2901 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2903 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2904 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2906 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2908 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2912 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2914 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2916 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2917 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2918 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2919 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2920 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2922 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2923 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2925 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2926 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2928 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2929 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2931 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2932 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2933 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2937 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2938 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2939 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2940 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2941 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2942 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2943 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2944 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2945 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2946 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2947 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2948 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2949 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2950 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2952 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2954 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2955 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2957 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2959 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2961 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2962 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2964 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2966 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2967 without a trailing newline.
2969 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2970 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2972 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2975 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2979 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2981 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2983 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2984 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2985 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2986 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2988 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2990 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2991 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2992 be printed without leading spaces.
2994 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2995 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3000 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3001 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3002 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3004 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3006 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3007 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3009 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3010 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3012 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3013 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3015 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3017 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3019 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3021 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
3022 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3024 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3026 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3028 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3029 byte offsets are specified.
3032 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3035 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
3038 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3039 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3040 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3041 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3042 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3043 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3044 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3045 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
3046 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3047 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3048 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3049 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3050 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3051 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3052 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3053 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3054 directory where M has write access.
3055 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3056 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3057 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3060 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3061 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
3062 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3063 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3064 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3065 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
3066 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3067 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3068 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3069 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3070 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3071 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3072 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3073 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3074 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3075 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3076 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3077 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3078 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
3079 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3080 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3081 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3082 appeared one additional time.
3084 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3085 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3086 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3087 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3090 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
3091 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3092 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3093 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3094 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3095 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3096 if there were more than 338.
3098 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3099 - false --help now exits nonzero
3102 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3103 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3104 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3105 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3108 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3109 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
3110 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
3111 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3112 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3115 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3116 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3117 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3118 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
3119 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3120 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3121 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3124 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3125 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3126 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3127 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3128 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3129 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3131 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3132 under certain unusual conditions
3133 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3134 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3137 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3138 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3139 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3140 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3141 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3142 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
3143 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3144 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3145 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
3146 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
3147 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3148 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3149 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3150 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3151 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3152 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3155 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3156 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3159 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3160 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3161 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3162 involving hard-linked directories
3163 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3164 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
3165 character-special and block files
3168 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3169 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3170 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3171 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3172 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3173 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3174 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3175 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3176 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3178 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
3179 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
3180 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3181 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3182 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3183 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3184 specified on the command line.
3185 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3186 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
3187 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3188 the first file untouched.
3189 * readlink: new program
3190 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3191 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3192 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3193 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3194 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3195 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3198 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3199 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3200 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3201 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3202 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3203 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3204 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3205 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3206 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3207 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3208 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3209 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3211 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3212 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3213 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3215 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3216 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3217 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3218 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3219 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3220 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3221 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3222 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3225 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3226 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3229 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3230 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3231 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3232 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3233 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3234 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3235 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3238 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3239 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3241 ========================================================================
3242 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3243 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3246 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3248 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3249 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3250 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3251 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3252 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3253 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3254 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3255 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3256 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3257 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3258 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3259 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3261 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3262 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3263 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3264 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3266 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3269 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3271 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3272 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3273 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3274 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3275 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3276 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3277 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3280 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3281 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3282 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3283 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3284 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3285 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3286 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3287 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3288 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3289 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3290 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3291 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3292 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3293 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3294 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3295 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3297 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3298 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3300 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3301 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3302 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3303 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3304 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3305 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3307 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3308 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3309 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3310 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3311 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3312 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3313 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3315 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3316 the source files in the following example:
3317 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3318 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3319 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3320 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3321 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3322 links between source files with --preserve=links
3323 * cp accepts new options:
3324 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3325 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3326 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3327 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3328 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3329 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3330 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3331 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3332 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3334 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3335 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3336 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3337 even though it's older than dest.
3338 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3339 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3340 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3341 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3342 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3344 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3345 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3346 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3347 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3348 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3349 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3350 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3352 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3353 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3354 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3356 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3357 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3358 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3359 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3360 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3361 This is the default.
3363 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3364 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3365 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3366 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3367 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3369 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3372 ========================================================================
3373 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3374 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3377 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3378 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3380 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3381 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3382 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3383 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3384 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3386 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3387 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3388 that specifies a non-directory
3391 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3392 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3393 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3394 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3395 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3396 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3397 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3398 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3399 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3400 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3401 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3402 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3403 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3404 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3405 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3406 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3407 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3408 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3409 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3410 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3411 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3412 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3413 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3414 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3416 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3417 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3418 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3420 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3422 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3423 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3425 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3426 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3427 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3428 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3429 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3431 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3432 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3433 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3434 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3435 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3437 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3439 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3440 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3441 * still more portability fixes
3442 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3443 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3445 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3447 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3449 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3451 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3452 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3453 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3454 there is any time remaining
3455 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3457 ========================================================================
3458 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3459 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3461 This package began as the union of the following:
3462 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3464 ========================================================================
3466 Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3468 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3469 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3470 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3471 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3472 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3473 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.