1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
8 processes will not intersperse their output.
9 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
11 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
12 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
13 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
14 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
15 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
16 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
18 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
19 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
21 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
22 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
23 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
25 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on PanFS file systems
26 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
27 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
31 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system type, panfs.
34 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
38 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
39 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
40 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
41 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
42 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
43 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
45 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
46 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
47 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
48 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
49 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
50 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
51 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
53 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
54 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
56 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
57 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
61 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
62 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
64 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
66 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
68 ** Changes in behavior
70 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
71 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
72 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
74 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
75 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
78 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
82 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
83 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
84 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
85 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
86 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
87 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
88 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
89 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
91 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
92 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
93 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
94 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
95 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
97 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
98 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
100 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
101 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
103 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
104 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
106 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
107 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
109 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
110 additional static suffix to output file names.
112 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
113 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
114 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
116 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
117 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
121 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
122 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
123 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
125 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
126 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
127 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
128 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
129 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
130 typically still point to one of the hard links.
132 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
133 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
134 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
135 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
136 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
138 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
139 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
140 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
141 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
145 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
146 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
147 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
149 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
150 instead of causing a usage failure.
152 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
155 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
159 realpath: print resolved file names.
163 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
164 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
166 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
167 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
169 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
170 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
171 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
172 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
173 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
174 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
176 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
177 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
178 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
180 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
181 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
182 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
184 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
185 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
186 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
187 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
188 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
190 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
192 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
193 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
195 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
196 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
197 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
199 ** Changes in behavior
201 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
202 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
203 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
204 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
205 usually-short referent instead.
207 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
208 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
209 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
210 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
213 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
217 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
218 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
219 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
221 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
222 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
224 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
225 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
229 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
230 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
232 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
233 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
234 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
235 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
237 ** Changes in behavior
239 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
240 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
241 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
245 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
246 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
247 only .tar.xz files is enough.
250 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
254 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
255 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
256 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
258 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
259 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
261 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
262 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
263 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
264 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
265 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
267 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
268 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
269 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
270 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
271 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
272 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
273 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
274 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
276 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
277 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
279 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
280 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
282 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
283 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
285 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
286 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
287 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
289 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
290 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
291 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
292 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
294 ** Changes in behavior
296 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
297 when -v or -c specified.
299 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
300 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
304 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
305 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
306 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
307 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
308 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
310 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
311 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
312 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
314 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
315 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
316 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
317 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
318 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
319 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
320 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
322 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
323 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
324 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
328 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
329 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
331 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
334 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
335 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
337 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
338 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
340 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
341 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
343 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
345 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
349 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
350 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
352 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
355 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
359 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
360 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
362 ** Changes in behavior
364 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
365 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
366 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
367 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
368 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
369 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
371 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
372 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
373 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
377 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
380 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
384 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
385 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
386 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
388 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
389 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
390 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
392 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
393 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
394 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
396 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
397 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
399 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
400 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
402 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
403 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
405 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
406 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
410 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
411 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
412 processed portion thereof.
414 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
415 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
417 ** Changes in behavior
419 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
420 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
421 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
423 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
424 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
425 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
427 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
428 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
430 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
431 Use --preserve-context instead.
433 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
436 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
440 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
441 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
442 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
443 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
444 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
446 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
447 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
449 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
450 reject file names invalid for that file system.
452 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
453 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
457 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
458 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
459 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
460 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
461 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
462 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
463 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
464 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
466 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
467 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
468 the same number of fields are output for each line.
470 ** Changes in behavior
472 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
473 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
474 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
477 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
481 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
482 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
483 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
486 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
490 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
491 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
493 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
494 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
496 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
497 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
499 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
500 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
501 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
502 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
504 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
505 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
507 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
508 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
509 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
511 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
513 ** Changes in behavior
515 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
516 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
517 to the number of available processors.
521 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
524 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
528 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
529 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
530 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
531 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
533 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
534 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
535 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
537 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
538 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
540 ** Changes in behavior
542 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
543 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
545 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
546 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
547 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
548 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
549 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
550 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
552 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
553 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
554 the same way as the others.
557 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
561 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
562 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
563 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
565 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
566 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
568 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
569 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
570 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
572 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
573 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
575 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
576 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
578 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
579 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
580 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
582 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
583 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
584 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
585 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
589 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
590 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
592 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
595 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
596 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
598 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
600 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
601 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
602 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
604 ** Changes in behavior
606 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
607 rather than its aliased target.
609 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
610 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
611 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
613 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
614 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
615 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
616 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
617 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
618 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
619 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
620 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
622 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
624 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
626 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
627 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
630 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
631 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
632 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
633 control like taskset for example.
635 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
637 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
638 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
639 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
640 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
641 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
642 includes %C when context information is available.
644 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
645 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
646 rather than a file system attribute.
648 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
649 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
650 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
651 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
653 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
654 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
655 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
657 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
658 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
659 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
662 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
666 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
667 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
669 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
671 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
672 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
674 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
675 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
676 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
677 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
679 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
680 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
681 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
685 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
686 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
688 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
689 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
690 duration after the initial signal was sent.
692 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
693 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
694 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
695 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
696 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
697 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
698 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
699 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
700 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
702 ** Changes in behavior
704 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
705 sequence when it would be a no-op.
707 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
708 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
711 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
715 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
716 of available processors, which may not have been the case
717 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
718 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
722 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
723 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
725 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
726 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
727 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
728 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
730 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
731 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
732 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
735 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
739 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
740 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
741 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
743 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
744 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
745 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
747 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
748 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
750 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
751 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
752 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
753 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
755 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
756 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
757 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
759 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
760 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
761 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
762 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
764 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
765 renamed-aside and then recreated.
766 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
768 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
769 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
770 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
771 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
773 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
774 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
775 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
777 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
778 processes will not intersperse their output.
779 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
782 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
786 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
787 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
789 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
790 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
792 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
793 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
794 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
795 the presence of the empty string argument.
796 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
798 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
799 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
800 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
801 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
803 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
804 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
806 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
807 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
808 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
810 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
811 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
812 and with a malicious user on the same system
813 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
814 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
817 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
821 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
822 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
823 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
825 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
826 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
827 offending directory and all "contents."
829 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
830 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
831 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
833 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
834 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
835 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
837 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
838 processes will not intersperse their output.
839 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
840 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
842 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
843 output the name of the file to stdout.
844 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
846 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
847 call fails with errno == EACCES.
848 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
850 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
851 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
854 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
855 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
856 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
858 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
859 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
860 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
861 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
862 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
863 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
865 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
866 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
867 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
868 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
870 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
871 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
873 ** Changes in behavior
875 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
876 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
877 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
878 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
879 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
881 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
882 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
883 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
884 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
886 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
888 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
889 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
890 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
891 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
892 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
896 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
900 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
901 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
903 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
904 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
906 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
907 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
908 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
910 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
911 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
914 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
918 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
919 when the source file doesn't have write access.
920 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
922 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
923 to accommodate leap seconds.
924 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
926 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
927 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
928 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
930 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
932 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
933 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
934 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
936 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
937 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
938 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
939 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
940 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
944 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
945 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
946 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
947 directory or a symlink to a directory.
949 ** Changes in behavior
951 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
952 environment variable is set.
954 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
955 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
956 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
960 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
961 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
962 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
963 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
965 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
966 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
967 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
968 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
972 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
973 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
974 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
976 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
977 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
978 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
979 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
980 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
981 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
984 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
985 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
988 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
992 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
993 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
994 and libraries tested at configure time.
995 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
997 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
998 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1000 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1001 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1003 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1004 printing a summary to stderr.
1005 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1007 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1008 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1009 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1011 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1012 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1014 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1015 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1016 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1017 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1019 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1020 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1021 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1022 which is relatively unusual.
1023 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1025 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1026 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1027 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1028 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1029 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1030 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1031 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1035 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1036 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1037 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1038 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1039 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1043 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1044 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1046 ** Changes in behavior
1048 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1049 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1050 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1051 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1052 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1055 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1059 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1060 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1062 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1063 before data copying has started.
1065 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1066 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1068 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1069 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1070 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1071 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1073 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1074 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1075 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1076 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1078 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1083 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1084 for its standard streams.
1086 ** Changes in behavior
1088 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1089 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1090 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1091 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1092 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1093 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1095 ** Deprecated options
1097 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1098 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1102 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1104 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1105 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1106 a btrfs file system.
1108 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1110 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1111 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1113 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1114 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1117 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1121 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1122 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1123 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1124 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1126 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1127 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1128 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1129 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1130 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1135 make check: two tests have been corrected
1139 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1140 inherited from gnulib.
1143 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1147 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1148 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1149 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1150 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1152 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1153 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1155 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1157 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1158 systems without xattr support.
1160 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1161 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1162 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1164 ** Changes in behavior
1166 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1167 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1168 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1169 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1171 ** Improved robustness
1173 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1174 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1175 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1176 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1177 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1178 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1179 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1180 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1181 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1185 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1186 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1188 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1189 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1190 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1191 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1192 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1195 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1199 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1200 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1201 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1205 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1206 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1207 data was read, or on process exit.
1208 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1210 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1211 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1212 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1213 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1215 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1216 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1217 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1218 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1220 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1221 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1223 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1224 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1226 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1227 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1228 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1230 ** Changes in behavior
1232 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1233 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1234 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1236 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1237 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1239 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1240 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1241 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1244 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1248 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1250 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1251 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1252 install: Never copies xattrs
1254 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1255 from overwriting any existing destination file
1257 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1258 mode where this feature is available.
1260 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1261 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1262 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1263 do not modify the destination at all.
1265 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1267 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1271 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1272 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1274 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1276 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1277 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1279 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1280 processing the first file name
1282 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1283 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1284 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1285 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1287 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1288 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1290 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1291 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1294 ** Changes in behavior
1296 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1297 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1299 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1300 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1301 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1303 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1304 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1306 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1308 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1309 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1310 is still marked with a '+'.
1313 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1317 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1318 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1322 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1323 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1324 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1325 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1326 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1327 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1329 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1330 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1332 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1333 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1335 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1337 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1338 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1339 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1341 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1342 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1344 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1345 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1346 used to factor large numbers.
1348 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1351 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1353 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1355 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1356 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1358 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1359 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1360 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1361 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1363 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1364 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1365 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1367 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1368 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1372 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1374 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1375 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1377 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1378 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1380 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1382 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1383 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1387 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1388 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1389 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1391 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1393 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1394 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1395 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1397 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1398 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1399 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1401 ** Changes in behavior
1403 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1404 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1407 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1411 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1412 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1413 'futimens' system calls.
1417 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1419 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1420 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1421 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1423 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1424 with no USERNAME argument.
1426 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1427 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1428 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1430 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1431 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1432 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1433 number of fields for some inputs.
1435 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1436 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1438 ** Changes in behavior
1440 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1441 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1444 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1448 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1450 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1451 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1452 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1453 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1455 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1456 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1458 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1459 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1461 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1462 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1464 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1465 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1466 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1467 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1469 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1470 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1471 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1472 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1473 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1474 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1476 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1477 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1479 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1480 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1481 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1483 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1484 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1486 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1487 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1489 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1490 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1491 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1492 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1494 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1495 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1497 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1498 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1500 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1501 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1502 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1506 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1507 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1509 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1510 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1511 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1512 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1516 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1517 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1519 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1521 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1525 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1526 which have negative errno values.
1530 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1534 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1538 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1539 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1542 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1546 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1547 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1548 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1550 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1551 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1552 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1553 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1557 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1558 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1559 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1560 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1563 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1567 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1569 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1570 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1571 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1574 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1578 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1579 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1581 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1583 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1585 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1587 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1591 ** Changes in behavior
1593 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1594 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1596 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1597 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1599 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1600 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1601 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1605 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1606 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1607 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1608 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1609 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1610 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1611 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1612 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1613 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1614 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1615 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1617 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1618 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1619 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1622 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1625 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1626 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1627 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1629 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1630 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1631 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1634 ** New build options
1636 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1637 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1638 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1639 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1641 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1642 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1643 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1644 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1645 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1646 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1647 of "make check" fail.
1649 ** Remove deprecated options
1651 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1652 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1653 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1654 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1655 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1657 ** Improved robustness
1659 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1660 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1661 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1662 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1663 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1664 loss of the contents of a/f.
1666 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1667 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1671 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1672 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1673 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1675 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1676 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1677 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1678 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1680 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1681 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1682 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1683 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1684 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1685 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1686 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1687 destination is a symlink.
1689 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1691 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1692 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1694 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1695 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1697 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1699 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1700 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1702 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1703 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1705 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1708 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1709 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1711 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1712 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1714 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1715 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1716 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1717 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1719 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1720 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1721 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1723 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1724 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1725 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1727 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1728 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1729 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1730 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1732 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1733 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1734 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1736 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1737 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1739 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1740 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1742 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1744 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1745 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1746 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1748 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1749 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1751 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1752 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1754 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1755 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1757 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1758 [present in the original version]
1761 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1765 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1767 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1768 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1769 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1771 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1772 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1774 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1778 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1779 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1781 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1782 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1784 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1785 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1787 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1788 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1789 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1790 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1791 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1792 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1794 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1795 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1798 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1799 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1801 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1804 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1805 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1806 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1808 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1809 directory is unreadable.
1811 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1812 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1813 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1815 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1816 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1817 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1818 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1819 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1822 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1823 Before it would print nothing.
1825 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1827 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1828 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1829 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1830 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1831 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1832 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1833 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1834 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1836 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1840 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1841 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1842 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1844 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1845 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1846 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1847 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1850 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1854 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1855 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1856 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1857 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1858 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1859 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1860 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1862 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1863 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1864 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1865 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1866 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1867 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1868 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1869 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1871 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1872 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1873 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1876 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1880 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1881 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1883 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1884 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1885 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1887 ** Improved robustness
1889 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1890 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1891 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1894 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1898 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1899 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1900 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1901 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1902 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1904 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1908 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1911 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1915 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1916 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1917 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1918 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1920 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1921 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1923 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1924 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1925 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1928 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1930 ** Improved robustness
1932 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1933 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1935 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1936 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1937 or NFS-mounted partition.
1939 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1940 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1944 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1945 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1946 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1947 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1948 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1949 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1951 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1952 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1954 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1955 or neglect to report file removal.
1957 For the "groups" command:
1959 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1960 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1962 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1964 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1966 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1970 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1971 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1974 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1976 ** Changes in behavior
1978 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1979 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1980 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1981 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1983 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
1984 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1985 a final './' or '../' component.
1987 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1988 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1989 this only for pipes.
1991 ** Infrastructure changes
1993 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1994 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1995 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1996 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2000 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2001 name is "." or "..".
2003 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2004 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2005 dirent.d_type support.
2007 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2008 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2010 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2011 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2012 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2013 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2016 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2018 ** Changes in behavior
2020 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2024 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2025 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2029 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2030 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2031 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2033 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2034 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2036 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2037 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2039 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2041 ** Improved robustness
2043 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2044 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2045 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2047 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2048 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2051 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2052 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2054 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2055 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2057 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2058 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2060 ** Changes in behavior
2062 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2063 where the two are distinct.
2065 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2066 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2067 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2068 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2069 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2070 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2071 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2072 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2073 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2074 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2075 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2076 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2077 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2078 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2079 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2080 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2081 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2083 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2084 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2085 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2087 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2088 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2089 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2090 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2093 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2094 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2098 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2099 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2100 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2101 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2103 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2104 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2105 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2107 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2108 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2109 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2110 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2111 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2114 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2115 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2117 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2118 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2119 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2120 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2122 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2123 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2124 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2126 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2127 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2128 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2129 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2131 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2132 and sticky) with the -m option.
2134 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2135 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2136 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2137 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2138 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2140 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2141 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2143 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2147 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2148 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2149 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2150 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2152 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2154 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2156 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2157 silently ignoring one of them.
2159 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2160 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2161 containing this change was 5.92.
2163 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2164 automatically newline terminated.
2166 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2167 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2168 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2169 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2172 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2173 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2174 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2177 ** Scheduled for removal
2179 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2180 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2182 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2183 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2184 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2185 command to unlink a directory.
2187 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2188 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2189 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2190 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2194 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2195 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2196 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2197 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2198 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2199 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2203 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2204 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2206 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2208 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2209 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2210 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2212 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2213 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2216 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2217 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2219 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2220 list directories before files.
2222 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2223 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2224 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2225 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2228 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2230 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2232 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2233 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2234 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2236 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2237 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2241 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2242 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2243 usually printing nothing.
2245 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2247 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2248 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2249 them with hard-linked directories.
2251 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2252 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2253 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2255 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2256 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2257 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2259 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2262 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2263 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2265 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2266 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2268 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2269 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2271 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2272 all command-line arguments.
2274 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2276 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2278 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2279 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2281 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2283 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2284 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2285 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2286 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2287 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2289 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2290 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2292 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2293 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2294 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2295 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2297 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2299 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2303 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2304 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2306 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2307 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2309 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2310 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2312 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2313 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2315 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2316 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2318 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2320 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2321 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2322 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2325 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2327 ** Build-related bug fixes
2329 installing .mo files would fail
2332 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2336 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2338 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2341 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2345 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2346 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2350 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2352 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2353 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2355 ** Deprecated options
2357 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2358 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2360 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2364 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2366 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2367 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2368 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2369 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2371 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2374 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2380 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2385 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2387 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2389 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2390 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2391 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2393 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2394 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2395 problematic usages. These include:
2397 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2398 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2399 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2400 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2401 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2402 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2403 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2404 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2405 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2407 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2408 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2410 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2411 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2412 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2413 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2415 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2416 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2417 between binary and text files.
2419 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2423 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2427 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2428 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2430 head tac tail tee tr
2431 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2433 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2434 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2436 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2437 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2438 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2440 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2442 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2444 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2445 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2446 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2450 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2452 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2453 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2455 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2456 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2457 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2461 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2462 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2466 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2467 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2468 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2472 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2473 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2477 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2479 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2481 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2485 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2486 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2487 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2489 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2490 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2491 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2492 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2493 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2495 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2499 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2500 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2501 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2503 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2505 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2506 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2507 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2508 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2510 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2512 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2513 rather than silently wrapping around.
2515 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2516 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2518 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2519 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2521 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2522 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2523 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2524 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2526 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2528 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2530 ** Improved robustness
2532 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2533 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2534 no matter how large the result.
2536 ** Improved portability
2538 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2539 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2541 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2543 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2544 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2545 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2547 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2548 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2552 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2553 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2555 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2557 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2558 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2559 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2560 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2562 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2563 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2565 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2566 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2567 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2569 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2571 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2572 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2574 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2575 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2577 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2579 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2580 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2582 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2583 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2585 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2586 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2587 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2589 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2591 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2593 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2597 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2599 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2600 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2601 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2603 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2604 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2606 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2607 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2608 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2610 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2611 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2613 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2614 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2615 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2616 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2618 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2619 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2621 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2622 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2623 the file system does not support it.
2625 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2627 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2628 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2630 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2632 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2633 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2635 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2636 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2637 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2638 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2640 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2641 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2644 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2645 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2646 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2647 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2649 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2650 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2651 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2652 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2654 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2655 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2657 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2659 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2660 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2661 reporting incorrect results.
2665 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2666 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2668 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2671 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2673 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2674 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2676 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2677 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2679 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2682 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2683 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2684 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2685 the file name does not look like a page range.
2687 printf has several changes:
2689 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2690 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2692 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2693 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2694 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2696 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2697 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2700 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2701 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2703 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2704 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2706 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2708 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2709 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2711 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2713 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2715 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2716 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2717 when first encountering the directory.
2721 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2722 output; POSIX requires this.
2724 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2725 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2727 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2729 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2730 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2732 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2733 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2735 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2736 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2737 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2738 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2739 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2740 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2741 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2743 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2744 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2745 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2747 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2748 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2750 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2752 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2754 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2755 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2756 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2757 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2759 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2763 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2764 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2765 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2766 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
2767 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
2769 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2770 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2771 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2773 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2774 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2776 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2777 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2779 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2780 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2781 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2782 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2783 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2785 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2786 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2788 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2789 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2791 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2793 nocreat do not create the output file
2794 excl fail if the output file already exists
2795 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2796 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2798 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2800 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2801 direct use direct I/O for data
2802 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2803 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2804 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2805 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2806 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2808 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2810 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2811 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
2814 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2815 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2816 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2817 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2818 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2819 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2821 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2822 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2824 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2827 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2829 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2831 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2832 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2834 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2835 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2836 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2838 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2839 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2840 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2842 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2844 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2845 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2847 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2848 for compatibility with bash.
2850 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2852 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2853 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2854 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2855 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2857 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2858 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2860 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2861 ls supports TABSIZE.
2862 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2863 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2864 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2866 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2869 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2871 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2872 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2873 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2874 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2875 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2876 an offset, not as a file name.
2878 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2879 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2881 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2882 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2884 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2885 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2887 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2888 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2889 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2891 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2892 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2894 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2895 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2899 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2901 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2903 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2907 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2908 or more arguments between partitions.
2910 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2911 holes in the destination.
2913 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2914 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2915 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2916 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2917 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2918 terminates immediately.
2920 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2922 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2924 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2925 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2926 not the empty string.
2928 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2929 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2933 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2934 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2935 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
2938 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2945 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2949 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2950 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
2952 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2953 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2955 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2956 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2957 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2960 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2964 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2965 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2967 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2968 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2970 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2971 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2972 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2974 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2976 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2979 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2981 ** Configuration option
2983 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2984 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2988 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2989 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2993 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2994 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2995 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2998 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2999 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3000 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3001 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3002 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3003 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3004 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3007 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3011 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3012 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3013 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3015 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3016 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3018 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3020 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3021 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3022 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3023 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3025 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3027 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3028 not just the ones that reference directories
3030 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3031 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3033 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3034 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3035 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3037 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3038 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3039 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3040 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3041 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3042 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3044 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3049 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3050 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3052 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3054 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3056 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3058 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3059 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3061 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3062 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3064 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3066 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3070 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3072 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3074 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3075 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3076 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3077 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3078 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3080 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3081 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3083 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3084 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3086 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3087 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3089 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3090 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3091 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3095 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3096 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3097 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3098 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3099 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3100 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3101 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3102 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3103 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3104 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3105 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3106 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3107 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3108 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3110 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3112 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3113 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3115 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3117 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3119 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3120 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3122 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3124 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3125 without a trailing newline.
3127 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3128 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3130 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3133 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3137 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3139 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3141 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3142 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3143 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3144 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3146 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3148 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3149 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3150 be printed without leading spaces.
3152 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3153 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3158 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3159 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3160 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3162 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3164 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3165 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3167 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3168 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3170 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3171 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3173 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3175 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3177 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3179 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3180 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3182 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3184 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3186 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3187 byte offsets are specified.
3190 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3193 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3196 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3197 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3198 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3199 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3200 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3201 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3202 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3203 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3204 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3205 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3206 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3207 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3208 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3209 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3210 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3211 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3212 directory where M has write access.
3213 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3214 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3215 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3218 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3219 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3220 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3221 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3222 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3223 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3224 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3225 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3226 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3227 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3228 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3229 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3230 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3231 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3232 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3233 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3234 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3235 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3236 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3237 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3238 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3239 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3240 appeared one additional time.
3242 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3243 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3244 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3245 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3248 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3249 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3250 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3251 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3252 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3253 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3254 if there were more than 338.
3256 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3257 - false --help now exits nonzero
3260 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3261 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3262 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3263 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3266 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3267 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3268 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3269 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3270 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3273 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3274 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3275 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3276 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3277 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3278 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3279 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3282 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3283 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3284 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3285 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3286 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3287 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3289 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3290 under certain unusual conditions
3291 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3292 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3295 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3296 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3297 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3298 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3299 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3300 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3301 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3302 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3303 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3304 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3305 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3306 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3307 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3308 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3309 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3310 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3313 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3314 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3317 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3318 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3319 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3320 involving hard-linked directories
3321 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3322 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3323 character-special and block files
3326 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3327 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3328 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3329 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3330 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3331 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3332 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3333 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3334 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3336 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3337 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3338 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3339 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3340 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3341 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3342 specified on the command line.
3343 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3344 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3345 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3346 the first file untouched.
3347 * readlink: new program
3348 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3349 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3350 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3351 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3352 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3353 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3356 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3357 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3358 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3359 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3360 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3361 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3362 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3363 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3364 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3365 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3366 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3367 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3369 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3370 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3371 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3373 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3374 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3375 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3376 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3377 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3378 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3379 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3380 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3383 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3384 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3387 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3388 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3389 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3390 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3391 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3392 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3393 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3396 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3397 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3399 ========================================================================
3400 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3401 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3404 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3406 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3407 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3408 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3409 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3410 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3411 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3412 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3413 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3414 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3415 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3416 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3417 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3419 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3420 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3421 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3422 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3424 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3427 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3429 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3430 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3431 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3432 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3433 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3434 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3435 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3438 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3439 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3440 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3441 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3442 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3443 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3444 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3445 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3446 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3447 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3448 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3449 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3450 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3451 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3452 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3453 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3455 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3456 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3458 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3459 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3460 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3461 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3462 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3463 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3465 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3466 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3467 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3468 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3469 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3470 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3471 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3473 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3474 the source files in the following example:
3475 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3476 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3477 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3478 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3479 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3480 links between source files with --preserve=links
3481 * cp accepts new options:
3482 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3483 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3484 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3485 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3486 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3487 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3488 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3489 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3490 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3492 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3493 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3494 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3495 even though it's older than dest.
3496 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3497 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3498 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3499 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3500 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3502 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3503 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3504 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3505 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3506 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3507 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3508 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3510 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3511 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3512 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3514 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3515 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3516 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3517 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3518 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3519 This is the default.
3521 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3522 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3523 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3524 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3525 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3527 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3530 ========================================================================
3531 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3532 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3535 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3536 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3538 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3539 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3540 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3541 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3542 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3544 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3545 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3546 that specifies a non-directory
3549 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3550 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3551 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3552 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3553 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3554 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3555 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3556 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3557 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3558 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3559 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3560 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3561 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3562 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3563 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3564 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3565 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3566 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3567 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3568 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3569 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3570 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3571 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3572 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3574 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3575 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3576 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3578 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3580 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3581 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3583 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3584 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3585 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3586 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3587 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3589 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3590 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3591 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3592 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3593 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3595 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3597 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3598 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3599 * still more portability fixes
3600 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3601 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3603 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3605 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3607 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3609 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3610 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3611 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3612 there is any time remaining
3613 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3615 ========================================================================
3616 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3617 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3619 This package began as the union of the following:
3620 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3622 ========================================================================
3624 Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3626 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3627 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3628 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3629 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3630 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3631 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.