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 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
12 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
14 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
15 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
16 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
19 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
23 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
24 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
25 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
26 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
27 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
28 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
30 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
31 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
32 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
33 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
34 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
35 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
36 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
38 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
39 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
41 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
42 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
46 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
47 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
49 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
51 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
53 ** Changes in behavior
55 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
56 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
57 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
59 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
60 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
63 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
67 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
68 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
69 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
70 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
71 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
72 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
73 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
74 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
76 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
77 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
78 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
79 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
80 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
82 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
83 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
85 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
86 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
88 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
89 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
91 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
92 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
94 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
95 additional static suffix to output file names.
97 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
98 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
99 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
101 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
102 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
106 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
107 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
108 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
110 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
111 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
112 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
113 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
114 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
115 typically still point to one of the hard links.
117 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
118 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
119 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
120 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
121 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
123 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
124 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
125 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
126 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
130 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
131 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
132 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
134 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
135 instead of causing a usage failure.
137 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
140 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
144 realpath: print resolved file names.
148 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
149 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
151 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
152 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
154 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
155 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
156 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
157 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
158 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
159 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
161 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
162 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
163 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
165 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
166 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
167 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
169 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
170 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
171 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
172 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
173 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
175 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
177 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
178 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
180 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
181 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
182 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
184 ** Changes in behavior
186 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
187 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
188 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
189 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
190 usually-short referent instead.
192 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
193 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
194 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
195 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
198 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
202 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
203 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
204 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
206 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
207 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
209 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
210 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
214 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
215 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
217 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
218 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
219 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
220 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
222 ** Changes in behavior
224 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
225 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
226 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
230 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
231 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
232 only .tar.xz files is enough.
235 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
239 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
240 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
241 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
243 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
244 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
246 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
247 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
248 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
249 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
250 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
252 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
253 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
254 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
255 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
256 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
257 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
258 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
259 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
261 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
262 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
264 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
265 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
267 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
268 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
270 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
271 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
272 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
274 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
275 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
276 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
277 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
279 ** Changes in behavior
281 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
282 when -v or -c specified.
284 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
285 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
289 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
290 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
291 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
292 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
293 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
295 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
296 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
297 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
299 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
300 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
301 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
302 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
303 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
304 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
305 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
307 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
308 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
309 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
313 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
314 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
316 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
319 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
320 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
322 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
323 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
325 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
326 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
328 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
330 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
334 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
335 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
337 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
340 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
344 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
345 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
347 ** Changes in behavior
349 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
350 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
351 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
352 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
353 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
354 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
356 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
357 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
358 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
362 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
365 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
369 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
370 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
371 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
373 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
374 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
375 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
377 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
378 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
379 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
381 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
382 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
384 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
385 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
387 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
388 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
390 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
391 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
395 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
396 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
397 processed portion thereof.
399 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
400 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
402 ** Changes in behavior
404 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
405 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
406 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
408 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
409 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
410 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
412 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
413 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
415 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
416 Use --preserve-context instead.
418 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
421 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
425 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
426 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
427 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
428 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
429 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
431 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
432 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
434 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
435 reject file names invalid for that file system.
437 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
438 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
442 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
443 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
444 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
445 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
446 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
447 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
448 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
449 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
451 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
452 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
453 the same number of fields are output for each line.
455 ** Changes in behavior
457 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
458 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
459 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
462 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
466 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
467 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
468 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
471 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
475 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
476 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
478 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
479 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
481 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
482 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
484 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
485 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
486 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
487 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
489 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
490 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
492 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
493 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
494 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
496 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
498 ** Changes in behavior
500 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
501 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
502 to the number of available processors.
506 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
509 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
513 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
514 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
515 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
516 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
518 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
519 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
520 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
522 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
523 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
525 ** Changes in behavior
527 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
528 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
530 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
531 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
532 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
533 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
534 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
535 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
537 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
538 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
539 the same way as the others.
542 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
546 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
547 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
548 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
550 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
551 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
553 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
554 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
555 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
557 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
558 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
560 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
561 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
563 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
564 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
565 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
567 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
568 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
569 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
570 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
574 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
575 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
577 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
580 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
581 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
583 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
585 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
586 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
587 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
589 ** Changes in behavior
591 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
592 rather than its aliased target.
594 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
595 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
596 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
598 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
599 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
600 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
601 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
602 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
603 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
604 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
605 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
607 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
609 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
611 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
612 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
615 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
616 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
617 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
618 control like taskset for example.
620 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
622 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
623 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
624 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
625 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
626 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
627 includes %C when context information is available.
629 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
630 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
631 rather than a file system attribute.
633 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
634 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
635 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
636 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
638 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
639 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
640 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
642 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
643 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
644 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
647 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
651 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
652 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
654 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
656 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
657 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
659 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
660 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
661 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
662 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
664 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
665 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
666 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
670 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
671 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
673 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
674 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
675 duration after the initial signal was sent.
677 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
678 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
679 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
680 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
681 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
682 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
683 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
684 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
685 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
687 ** Changes in behavior
689 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
690 sequence when it would be a no-op.
692 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
693 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
696 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
700 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
701 of available processors, which may not have been the case
702 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
703 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
707 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
708 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
710 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
711 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
712 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
713 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
715 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
716 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
717 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
720 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
724 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
725 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
726 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
728 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
729 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
730 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
732 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
733 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
735 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
736 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
737 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
738 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
740 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
741 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
742 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
744 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
745 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
746 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
747 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
749 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
750 renamed-aside and then recreated.
751 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
753 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
754 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
755 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
756 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
758 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
759 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
760 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
762 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
763 processes will not intersperse their output.
764 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
767 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
771 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
772 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
774 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
775 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
777 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
778 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
779 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
780 the presence of the empty string argument.
781 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
783 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
784 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
785 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
786 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
788 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
789 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
791 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
792 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
793 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
795 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
796 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
797 and with a malicious user on the same system
798 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
799 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
802 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
806 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
807 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
808 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
810 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
811 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
812 offending directory and all "contents."
814 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
815 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
816 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
818 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
819 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
820 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
822 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
823 processes will not intersperse their output.
824 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
825 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
827 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
828 output the name of the file to stdout.
829 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
831 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
832 call fails with errno == EACCES.
833 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
835 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
836 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
839 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
840 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
841 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
843 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
844 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
845 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
846 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
847 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
848 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
850 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
851 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
852 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
853 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
855 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
856 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
858 ** Changes in behavior
860 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
861 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
862 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
863 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
864 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
866 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
867 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
868 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
869 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
871 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
873 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
874 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
875 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
876 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
877 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
881 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
885 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
886 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
888 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
889 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
891 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
892 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
893 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
895 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
896 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
899 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
903 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
904 when the source file doesn't have write access.
905 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
907 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
908 to accommodate leap seconds.
909 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
911 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
912 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
913 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
915 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
917 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
918 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
919 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
921 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
922 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
923 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
924 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
925 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
929 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
930 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
931 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
932 directory or a symlink to a directory.
934 ** Changes in behavior
936 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
937 environment variable is set.
939 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
940 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
941 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
945 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
946 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
947 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
948 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
950 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
951 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
952 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
953 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
957 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
958 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
959 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
961 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
962 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
963 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
964 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
965 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
966 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
969 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
970 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
973 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
977 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
978 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
979 and libraries tested at configure time.
980 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
982 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
983 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
985 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
986 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
988 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
989 printing a summary to stderr.
990 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
992 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
993 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
994 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
996 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
997 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
999 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1000 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1001 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1002 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1004 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1005 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1006 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1007 which is relatively unusual.
1008 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1010 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1011 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1012 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1013 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1014 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1015 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1016 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1020 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1021 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1022 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1023 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1024 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1028 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1029 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1031 ** Changes in behavior
1033 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1034 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1035 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1036 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1037 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1040 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1044 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1045 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1047 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1048 before data copying has started.
1050 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1051 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1053 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1054 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1055 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1056 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1058 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1059 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1060 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1061 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1063 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1068 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1069 for its standard streams.
1071 ** Changes in behavior
1073 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1074 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1075 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1076 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1077 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1078 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1080 ** Deprecated options
1082 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1083 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1087 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1089 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1090 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1091 a btrfs file system.
1093 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1095 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1096 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1098 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1099 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1102 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1106 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1107 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1108 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1109 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1111 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1112 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1113 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1114 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1115 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1120 make check: two tests have been corrected
1124 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1125 inherited from gnulib.
1128 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1132 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1133 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1134 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1135 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1137 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1138 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1140 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1142 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1143 systems without xattr support.
1145 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1146 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1147 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1149 ** Changes in behavior
1151 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1152 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1153 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1154 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1156 ** Improved robustness
1158 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1159 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1160 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1161 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1162 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1163 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1164 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1165 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1166 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1170 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1171 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1173 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1174 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1175 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1176 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1177 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1180 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1184 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1185 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1186 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1190 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1191 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1192 data was read, or on process exit.
1193 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1195 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1196 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1197 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1198 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1200 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1201 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1202 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1203 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1205 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1206 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1208 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1209 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1211 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1212 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1213 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1215 ** Changes in behavior
1217 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1218 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1219 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1221 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1222 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1224 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1225 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1226 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1229 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1233 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1235 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1236 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1237 install: Never copies xattrs
1239 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1240 from overwriting any existing destination file
1242 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1243 mode where this feature is available.
1245 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1246 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1247 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1248 do not modify the destination at all.
1250 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1252 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1256 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1257 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1259 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1261 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1262 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1264 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1265 processing the first file name
1267 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1268 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1269 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1270 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1272 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1273 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1275 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1276 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1279 ** Changes in behavior
1281 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1282 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1284 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1285 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1286 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1288 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1289 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1291 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1293 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1294 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1295 is still marked with a '+'.
1298 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1302 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1303 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1307 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1308 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1309 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1310 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1311 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1312 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1314 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1315 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1317 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1318 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1320 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1322 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1323 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1324 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1326 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1327 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1329 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1330 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1331 used to factor large numbers.
1333 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1336 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1338 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1340 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1341 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1343 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1344 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1345 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1346 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1348 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1349 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1350 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1352 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1353 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1357 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1359 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1360 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1362 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1363 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1365 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1367 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1368 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1372 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1373 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1374 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1376 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1378 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1379 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1380 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1382 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1383 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1384 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1386 ** Changes in behavior
1388 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1389 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1392 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1396 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1397 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1398 'futimens' system calls.
1402 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1404 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1405 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1406 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1408 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1409 with no USERNAME argument.
1411 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1412 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1413 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1415 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1416 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1417 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1418 number of fields for some inputs.
1420 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1421 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1423 ** Changes in behavior
1425 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1426 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1429 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1433 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1435 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1436 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1437 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1438 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1440 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1441 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1443 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1444 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1446 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1447 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1449 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1450 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1451 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1452 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1454 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1455 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1456 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1457 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1458 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1459 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1461 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1462 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1464 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1465 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1466 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1468 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1469 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1471 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1472 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1474 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1475 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1476 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1477 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1479 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1480 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1482 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1483 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1485 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1486 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1487 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1491 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1492 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1494 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1495 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1496 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1497 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1501 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1502 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1504 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1506 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1510 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1511 which have negative errno values.
1515 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1519 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1523 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1524 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1527 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1531 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1532 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1533 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1535 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1536 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1537 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1538 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1542 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1543 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1544 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1545 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1548 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1552 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1554 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1555 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1556 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1559 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1563 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1564 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1566 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1568 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1570 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1572 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1576 ** Changes in behavior
1578 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1579 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1581 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1582 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1584 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1585 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1586 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1590 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1591 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1592 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1593 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1594 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1595 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1596 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1597 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1598 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1599 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1600 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1602 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1603 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1604 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1607 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1610 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1611 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1612 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1614 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1615 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1616 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1619 ** New build options
1621 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1622 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1623 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1624 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1626 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1627 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1628 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1629 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1630 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1631 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1632 of "make check" fail.
1634 ** Remove deprecated options
1636 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1637 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1638 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1639 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1640 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1642 ** Improved robustness
1644 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1645 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1646 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1647 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1648 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1649 loss of the contents of a/f.
1651 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1652 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1656 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1657 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1658 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1660 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1661 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1662 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1663 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1665 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1666 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1667 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1668 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1669 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1670 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1671 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1672 destination is a symlink.
1674 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1676 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1677 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1679 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1680 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1682 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1684 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1685 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1687 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1688 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1690 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1693 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1694 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1696 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1697 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1699 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1700 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1701 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1702 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1704 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1705 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1706 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1708 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1709 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1710 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1712 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1713 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1714 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1715 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1717 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1718 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1719 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1721 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1722 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1724 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1725 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1727 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1729 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1730 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1731 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1733 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1734 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1736 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1737 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1739 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1740 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1742 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1743 [present in the original version]
1746 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1750 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1752 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1753 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1754 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1756 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1757 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1759 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1763 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1764 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1766 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1767 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1769 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1770 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1772 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1773 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1774 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1775 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1776 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1777 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1779 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1780 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1783 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1784 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1786 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1789 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1790 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1791 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1793 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1794 directory is unreadable.
1796 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1797 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1798 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1800 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1801 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1802 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1803 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1804 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1807 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1808 Before it would print nothing.
1810 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1812 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1813 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1814 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1815 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1816 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1817 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1818 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1819 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1821 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1825 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1826 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1827 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1829 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1830 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1831 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1832 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1835 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1839 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1840 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1841 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1842 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1843 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1844 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1845 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1847 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1848 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1849 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1850 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1851 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1852 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1853 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1854 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1856 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1857 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1858 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1861 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1865 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1866 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1868 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1869 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1870 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1872 ** Improved robustness
1874 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1875 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1876 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1879 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1883 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1884 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1885 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1886 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1887 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1889 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1893 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1896 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1900 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1901 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1902 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1903 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1905 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1906 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1908 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1909 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1910 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1913 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1915 ** Improved robustness
1917 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1918 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1920 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1921 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1922 or NFS-mounted partition.
1924 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1925 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1929 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1930 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1931 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1932 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1933 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1934 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1936 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1937 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1939 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1940 or neglect to report file removal.
1942 For the "groups" command:
1944 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1945 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1947 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1949 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1951 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1955 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1956 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1959 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1961 ** Changes in behavior
1963 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1964 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1965 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1966 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1968 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
1969 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1970 a final './' or '../' component.
1972 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1973 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1974 this only for pipes.
1976 ** Infrastructure changes
1978 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1979 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1980 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1981 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1985 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1986 name is "." or "..".
1988 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1989 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1990 dirent.d_type support.
1992 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1993 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1995 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1996 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1997 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1998 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2001 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2003 ** Changes in behavior
2005 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2009 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2010 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2014 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2015 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2016 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2018 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2019 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2021 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2022 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2024 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2026 ** Improved robustness
2028 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2029 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2030 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2032 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2033 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2036 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2037 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2039 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2040 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2042 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2043 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2045 ** Changes in behavior
2047 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2048 where the two are distinct.
2050 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2051 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2052 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2053 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2054 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2055 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2056 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2057 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2058 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2059 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2060 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2061 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2062 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2063 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2064 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2065 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2066 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2068 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2069 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2070 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2072 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2073 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2074 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2075 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2078 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2079 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2083 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2084 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2085 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2086 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2088 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2089 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2090 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2092 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2093 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2094 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2095 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2096 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2099 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2100 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2102 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2103 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2104 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2105 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2107 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2108 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2109 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2111 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2112 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2113 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2114 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2116 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2117 and sticky) with the -m option.
2119 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2120 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2121 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2122 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2123 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2125 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2126 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2128 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2132 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2133 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2134 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2135 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2137 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2139 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2141 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2142 silently ignoring one of them.
2144 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2145 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2146 containing this change was 5.92.
2148 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2149 automatically newline terminated.
2151 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2152 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2153 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2154 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2157 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2158 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2159 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2162 ** Scheduled for removal
2164 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2165 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2167 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2168 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2169 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2170 command to unlink a directory.
2172 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2173 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2174 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2175 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2179 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2180 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2181 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2182 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2183 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2184 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2188 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2189 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2191 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2193 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2194 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2195 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2197 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2198 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2201 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2202 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2204 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2205 list directories before files.
2207 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2208 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2209 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2210 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2213 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2215 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2217 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2218 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2219 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2221 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2222 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2226 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2227 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2228 usually printing nothing.
2230 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2232 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2233 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2234 them with hard-linked directories.
2236 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2237 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2238 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2240 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2241 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2242 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2244 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2247 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2248 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2250 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2251 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2253 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2254 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2256 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2257 all command-line arguments.
2259 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2261 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2263 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2264 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2266 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2268 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2269 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2270 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2271 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2272 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2274 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2275 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2277 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2278 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2279 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2280 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2282 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2284 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2288 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2289 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2291 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2292 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2294 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2295 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2297 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2298 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2300 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2301 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2303 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2305 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2306 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2307 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2310 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2312 ** Build-related bug fixes
2314 installing .mo files would fail
2317 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2321 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2323 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2326 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2330 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2331 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2335 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2337 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2338 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2340 ** Deprecated options
2342 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2343 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2345 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2349 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2351 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2352 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2353 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2354 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2356 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2359 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2365 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2370 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2372 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2374 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2375 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2376 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2378 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2379 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2380 problematic usages. These include:
2382 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2383 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2384 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2385 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2386 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2387 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2388 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2389 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2390 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2392 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2393 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2395 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2396 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2397 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2398 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2400 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2401 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2402 between binary and text files.
2404 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2408 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2412 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2413 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2415 head tac tail tee tr
2416 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2418 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2419 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2421 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2422 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2423 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2425 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2427 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2429 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2430 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2431 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2435 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2437 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2438 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2440 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2441 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2442 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2446 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2447 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2451 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2452 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2453 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2457 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2458 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2462 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2464 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2466 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2470 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2471 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2472 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2474 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2475 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2476 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2477 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2478 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2480 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2484 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2485 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2486 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2488 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2490 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2491 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2492 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2493 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2495 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2497 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2498 rather than silently wrapping around.
2500 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2501 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2503 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2504 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2506 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2507 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2508 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2509 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2511 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2513 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2515 ** Improved robustness
2517 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2518 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2519 no matter how large the result.
2521 ** Improved portability
2523 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2524 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2526 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2528 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2529 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2530 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2532 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2533 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2537 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2538 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2540 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2542 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2543 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2544 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2545 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2547 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2548 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2550 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2551 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2552 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2554 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2556 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2557 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2559 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2560 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2562 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2564 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2565 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2567 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2568 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2570 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2571 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2572 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2574 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2576 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2578 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2582 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2584 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2585 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2586 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2588 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2589 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2591 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2592 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2593 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2595 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2596 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2598 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2599 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2600 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2601 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2603 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2604 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2606 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2607 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2608 the file system does not support it.
2610 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2612 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2613 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2615 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2617 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2618 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2620 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2621 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2622 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2623 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2625 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2626 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2629 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2630 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2631 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2632 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2634 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2635 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2636 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2637 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2639 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2640 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2642 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2644 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2645 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2646 reporting incorrect results.
2650 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2651 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2653 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2656 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2658 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2659 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2661 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2662 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2664 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2667 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2668 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2669 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2670 the file name does not look like a page range.
2672 printf has several changes:
2674 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2675 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2677 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2678 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2679 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2681 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2682 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2685 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2686 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2688 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2689 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2691 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2693 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2694 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2696 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2698 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2700 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2701 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2702 when first encountering the directory.
2706 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2707 output; POSIX requires this.
2709 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2710 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2712 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2714 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2715 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2717 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2718 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2720 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2721 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2722 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2723 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2724 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2725 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2726 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2728 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2729 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2730 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2732 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2733 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2735 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2737 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2739 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2740 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2741 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2742 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2744 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2748 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2749 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2750 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2751 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
2752 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
2754 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2755 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2756 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2758 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2759 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2761 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2762 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2764 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2765 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2766 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2767 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2768 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2770 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2771 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2773 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2774 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2776 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2778 nocreat do not create the output file
2779 excl fail if the output file already exists
2780 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2781 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2783 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2785 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2786 direct use direct I/O for data
2787 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2788 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2789 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2790 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2791 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2793 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2795 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2796 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
2799 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2800 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2801 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2802 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2803 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2804 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2806 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2807 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2809 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2812 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2814 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2816 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2817 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2819 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2820 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2821 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2823 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2824 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2825 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2827 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2829 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2830 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2832 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2833 for compatibility with bash.
2835 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2837 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2838 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2839 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2840 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2842 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2843 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2845 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2846 ls supports TABSIZE.
2847 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2848 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2849 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2851 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2854 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2856 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2857 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2858 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2859 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2860 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2861 an offset, not as a file name.
2863 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2864 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2866 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2867 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2869 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2870 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2872 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2873 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2874 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2876 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2877 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2879 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2880 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2884 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2886 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2888 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2892 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2893 or more arguments between partitions.
2895 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2896 holes in the destination.
2898 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2899 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2900 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2901 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2902 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2903 terminates immediately.
2905 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2907 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2909 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2910 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2911 not the empty string.
2913 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2914 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2918 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2919 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2920 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
2923 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2930 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2934 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2935 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
2937 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2938 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2940 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2941 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2942 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2945 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2949 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2950 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2952 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2953 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2955 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2956 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2957 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2959 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2961 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2964 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2966 ** Configuration option
2968 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2969 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2973 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2974 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2978 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2979 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2980 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2983 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2984 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2985 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2986 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2987 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2988 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2989 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2992 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2996 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2997 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2998 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3000 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3001 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3003 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3005 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3006 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3007 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3008 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3010 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3012 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3013 not just the ones that reference directories
3015 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3016 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3018 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3019 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3020 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3022 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3023 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3024 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3025 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3026 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3027 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3029 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3034 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3035 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3037 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3039 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3041 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3043 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3044 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3046 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3047 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3049 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3051 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3055 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3057 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3059 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3060 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3061 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3062 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3063 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3065 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3066 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3068 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3069 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3071 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3072 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3074 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3075 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3076 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3080 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3081 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3082 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3083 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3084 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3085 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3086 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3087 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3088 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3089 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3090 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3091 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3092 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3093 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3095 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3097 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3098 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3100 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3102 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3104 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3105 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3107 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3109 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3110 without a trailing newline.
3112 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3113 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3115 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3118 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3122 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3124 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3126 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3127 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3128 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3129 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3131 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3133 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3134 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3135 be printed without leading spaces.
3137 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3138 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3143 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3144 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3145 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3147 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3149 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3150 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3152 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3153 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3155 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3156 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3158 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3160 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3162 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3164 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3165 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3167 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3169 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3171 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3172 byte offsets are specified.
3175 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3178 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3181 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3182 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3183 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3184 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3185 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3186 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3187 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3188 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3189 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3190 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3191 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3192 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3193 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3194 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3195 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3196 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3197 directory where M has write access.
3198 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3199 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3200 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3203 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3204 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3205 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3206 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3207 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3208 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3209 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3210 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3211 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3212 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3213 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3214 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3215 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3216 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3217 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3218 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3219 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3220 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3221 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3222 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3223 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3224 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3225 appeared one additional time.
3227 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3228 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3229 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3230 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3233 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3234 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3235 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3236 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3237 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3238 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3239 if there were more than 338.
3241 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3242 - false --help now exits nonzero
3245 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3246 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3247 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3248 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3251 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3252 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3253 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3254 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3255 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3258 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3259 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3260 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3261 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3262 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3263 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3264 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3267 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3268 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3269 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3270 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3271 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3272 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3274 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3275 under certain unusual conditions
3276 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3277 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3280 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3281 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3282 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3283 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3284 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3285 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3286 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3287 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3288 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3289 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3290 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3291 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3292 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3293 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3294 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3295 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3298 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3299 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3302 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3303 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3304 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3305 involving hard-linked directories
3306 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3307 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3308 character-special and block files
3311 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3312 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3313 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3314 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3315 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3316 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3317 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3318 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3319 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3321 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3322 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3323 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3324 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3325 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3326 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3327 specified on the command line.
3328 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3329 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3330 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3331 the first file untouched.
3332 * readlink: new program
3333 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3334 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3335 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3336 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3337 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3338 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3341 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3342 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3343 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3344 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3345 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3346 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3347 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3348 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3349 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3350 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3351 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3352 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3354 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3355 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3356 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3358 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3359 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3360 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3361 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3362 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3363 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3364 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3365 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3368 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3369 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3372 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3373 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3374 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3375 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3376 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3377 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3378 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3381 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3382 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3384 ========================================================================
3385 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3386 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3389 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3391 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3392 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3393 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3394 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3395 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3396 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3397 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3398 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3399 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3400 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3401 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3402 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3404 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3405 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3406 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3407 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3409 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3412 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3414 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3415 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3416 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3417 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3418 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3419 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3420 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3423 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3424 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3425 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3426 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3427 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3428 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3429 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3430 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3431 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3432 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3433 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3434 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3435 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3436 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3437 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3438 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3440 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3441 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3443 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3444 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3445 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3446 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3447 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3448 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3450 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3451 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3452 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3453 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3454 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3455 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3456 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3458 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3459 the source files in the following example:
3460 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3461 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3462 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3463 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3464 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3465 links between source files with --preserve=links
3466 * cp accepts new options:
3467 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3468 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3469 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3470 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3471 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3472 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3473 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3474 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3475 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3477 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3478 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3479 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3480 even though it's older than dest.
3481 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3482 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3483 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3484 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3485 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3487 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3488 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3489 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3490 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3491 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3492 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3493 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3495 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3496 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3497 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3499 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3500 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3501 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3502 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3503 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3504 This is the default.
3506 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3507 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3508 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3509 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3510 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3512 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3515 ========================================================================
3516 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3517 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3520 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3521 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3523 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3524 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3525 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3526 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3527 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3529 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3530 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3531 that specifies a non-directory
3534 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3535 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3536 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3537 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3538 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3539 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3540 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3541 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3542 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3543 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3544 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3545 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3546 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3547 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3548 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3549 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3550 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3551 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3552 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3553 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3554 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3555 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3556 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3557 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3559 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3560 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3561 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3563 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3565 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3566 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3568 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3569 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3570 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3571 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3572 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3574 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3575 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3576 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3577 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3578 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3580 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3582 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3583 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3584 * still more portability fixes
3585 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3586 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3588 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3590 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3592 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3594 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3595 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3596 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3597 there is any time remaining
3598 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3600 ========================================================================
3601 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3602 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3604 This package began as the union of the following:
3605 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3607 ========================================================================
3609 Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3611 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3612 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3613 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3614 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3615 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3616 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.