1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
8 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
9 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
10 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
11 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
13 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
14 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
16 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
17 reject file names invalid for that file system.
19 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
20 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
24 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
25 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
26 the same number of fields are output for each line.
29 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
33 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
34 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
35 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
38 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
42 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
43 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
45 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
46 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
48 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
49 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
51 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
52 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
53 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
54 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
56 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
57 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
59 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
60 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
61 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
63 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
65 ** Changes in behavior
67 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
68 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
69 to the number of available processors.
73 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
76 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
80 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
81 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
82 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
83 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
85 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
86 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
87 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
89 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
90 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
92 ** Changes in behavior
94 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
95 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
97 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
98 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
99 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
100 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
101 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
102 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
104 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
105 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
106 the same way as the others.
109 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
113 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
114 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
115 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
117 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
118 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
120 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
121 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
122 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
124 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
125 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
127 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
128 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
130 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
131 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
132 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
134 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
135 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
136 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
137 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
141 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
142 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
144 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
147 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
148 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
150 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
152 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
153 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
154 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
156 ** Changes in behavior
158 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
159 rather than its aliased target.
161 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
162 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
163 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
165 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
166 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
167 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
168 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
169 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
170 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
171 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
172 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
174 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
176 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
178 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
179 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
182 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
183 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
184 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
185 control like taskset for example.
187 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
189 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
190 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
191 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
192 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
193 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
194 includes %C when context information is available.
196 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
197 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
198 rather than a file system attribute.
200 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
201 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
202 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
203 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
205 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
206 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
207 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
209 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
210 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
211 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
214 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
218 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
219 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
221 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
223 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
224 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
226 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
227 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
228 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
229 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
231 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
232 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
233 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
237 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
238 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
240 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
241 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
242 duration after the initial signal was sent.
244 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
245 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
246 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
247 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
248 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
249 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
250 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
251 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
252 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
254 ** Changes in behavior
256 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
257 sequence when it would be a no-op.
259 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
260 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
263 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
267 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
268 of available processors, which may not have been the case
269 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
270 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
274 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
275 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
277 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
278 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
279 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
280 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
282 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
283 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
284 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
287 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
291 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
292 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
293 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
295 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
296 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
297 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
299 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
300 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
302 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
303 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
304 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
305 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
307 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
308 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
309 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
311 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
312 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
313 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
314 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
316 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
317 renamed-aside and then recreated.
318 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
320 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
321 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
322 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
323 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
325 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
326 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
327 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
329 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
330 processes will not intersperse their output.
331 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
334 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
338 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
339 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
341 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
342 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
344 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
345 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
346 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
347 the presence of the empty string argument.
348 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
350 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
351 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
352 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
353 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
355 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
356 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
358 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
359 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
360 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
362 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
363 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
364 and with a malicious user on the same system
365 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
366 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
369 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
373 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
374 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
375 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
377 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
378 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
379 offending directory and all "contents."
381 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
382 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
383 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
385 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
386 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
387 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
389 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
390 processes will not intersperse their output.
391 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
392 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
394 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
395 output the name of the file to stdout.
396 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
398 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
399 call fails with errno == EACCES.
400 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
402 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
403 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
406 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
407 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
408 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
410 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
411 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
412 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
413 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
414 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
415 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
417 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
418 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
419 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
420 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
422 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
423 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
425 ** Changes in behavior
427 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
428 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
429 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
430 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
431 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
433 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
434 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
435 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
436 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
438 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
440 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
441 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
442 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
443 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
444 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
448 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
452 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
453 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
455 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
456 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
458 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
459 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
460 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
462 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
463 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
466 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
470 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
471 when the source file doesn't have write access.
472 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
474 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
475 to accommodate leap seconds.
476 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
478 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
479 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
480 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
482 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
484 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
485 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
486 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
488 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
489 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
490 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
491 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
492 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
496 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
497 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
498 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
499 directory or a symlink to a directory.
501 ** Changes in behavior
503 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
504 environment variable is set.
506 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
507 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
508 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
512 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
513 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
514 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
515 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
517 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
518 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
519 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
520 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
524 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
525 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
526 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
528 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
529 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
530 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
531 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
532 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
533 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
536 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
537 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
540 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
544 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
545 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
546 and libraries tested at configure time.
547 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
549 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
550 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
552 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
553 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
555 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
556 printing a summary to stderr.
557 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
559 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
560 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
561 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
563 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
564 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
566 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
567 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
568 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
569 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
571 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
572 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
573 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
574 which is relatively unusual.
575 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
577 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
578 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
579 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
580 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
581 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
582 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
583 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
587 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
588 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
589 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
590 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
591 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
595 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
596 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
598 ** Changes in behavior
600 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
601 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
602 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
603 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
604 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
607 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
611 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
612 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
614 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
615 before data copying has started.
617 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
618 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
620 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
621 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
622 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
623 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
625 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
626 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
627 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
628 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
630 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
635 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
636 for its standard streams.
638 ** Changes in behavior
640 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
641 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
642 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
643 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
644 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
645 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
647 ** Deprecated options
649 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
650 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
654 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
656 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
657 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
660 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
662 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
663 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
665 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
666 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
669 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
673 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
674 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
675 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
676 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
678 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
679 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
680 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
681 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
682 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
687 make check: two tests have been corrected
691 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
692 inherited from gnulib.
695 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
699 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
700 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
701 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
702 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
704 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
705 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
707 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
709 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
710 systems without xattr support.
712 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
713 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
714 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
716 ** Changes in behavior
718 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
719 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
720 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
721 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
723 ** Improved robustness
725 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
726 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
727 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
728 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
729 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
730 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
731 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
732 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
733 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
737 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
738 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
740 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
741 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
742 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
743 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
744 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
747 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
751 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
752 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
753 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
757 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
758 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
759 data was read, or on process exit.
760 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
762 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
763 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
764 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
765 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
767 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
768 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
769 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
770 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
772 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
773 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
775 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
776 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
778 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
779 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
780 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
782 ** Changes in behavior
784 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
785 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
786 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
788 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
789 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
791 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
792 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
793 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
796 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
800 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
802 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
803 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
804 install: Never copies xattrs
806 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
807 from overwriting any existing destination file
809 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
810 mode where this feature is available.
812 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
813 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
814 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
815 do not modify the destination at all.
817 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
819 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
823 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
824 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
826 cp uses much less memory in some situations
828 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
829 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
831 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
832 processing the first file name
834 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
835 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
836 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
837 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
839 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
840 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
842 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
843 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
846 ** Changes in behavior
848 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
849 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
851 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
852 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
853 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
855 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
856 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
858 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
860 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
861 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
862 is still marked with a '+'.
865 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
869 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
870 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
874 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
875 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
876 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
877 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
878 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
879 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
881 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
882 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
884 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
885 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
887 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
889 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
890 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
891 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
893 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
894 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
896 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
897 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
898 used to factor large numbers.
900 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
903 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
905 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
907 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
908 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
910 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
911 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
912 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
913 maximum command-line (argv) length.
915 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
916 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
917 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
919 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
920 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
924 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
926 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
927 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
929 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
930 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
932 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
934 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
935 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
939 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
940 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
941 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
943 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
945 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
946 no matter how many files are in a given directory
948 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
949 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
950 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
952 ** Changes in behavior
954 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
955 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
958 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
962 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
964 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
965 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
966 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
968 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
969 with no USERNAME argument.
971 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
972 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
973 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
975 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
976 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
977 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
978 number of fields for some inputs.
980 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
981 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
983 ** Changes in behavior
985 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
986 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
989 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
993 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
995 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
996 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
997 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
998 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1000 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1001 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1003 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1004 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1006 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1007 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1009 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1010 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1011 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1012 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1014 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1015 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1016 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1017 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1018 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1019 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1021 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1022 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1024 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1025 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1026 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1028 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1029 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1031 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1032 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1034 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1035 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1036 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1037 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1039 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1040 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1042 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1043 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1045 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1046 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1047 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1051 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1052 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1054 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1055 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1056 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1057 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1061 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1062 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1064 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1066 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1070 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1071 which have negative errno values.
1075 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1079 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1083 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1084 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1087 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1091 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1092 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1093 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1095 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1096 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1097 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1098 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1102 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1103 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1104 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1105 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1108 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1112 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1114 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1115 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1116 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1119 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1123 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1124 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1126 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1128 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1130 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1132 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1136 ** Changes in behavior
1138 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1139 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1141 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1142 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1144 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1145 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1146 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1150 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1151 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1152 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1153 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1154 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1155 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1156 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1157 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1158 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1159 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1160 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1162 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1163 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1164 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1167 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1170 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1171 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1172 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1174 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1175 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1176 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1179 ** New build options
1181 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1182 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1183 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1184 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1186 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1187 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1188 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1189 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1190 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1191 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1192 of "make check" fail.
1194 ** Remove deprecated options
1196 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1197 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1198 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1199 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1200 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1202 ** Improved robustness
1204 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1205 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1206 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1207 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1208 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1209 loss of the contents of a/f.
1211 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1212 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1216 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1217 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1218 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1220 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1221 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1222 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1223 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1225 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1226 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1227 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1228 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1229 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1230 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1231 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1232 destination is a symlink.
1234 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1236 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1237 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1239 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1240 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1242 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1244 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1245 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1247 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1248 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1250 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1253 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1254 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1256 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1257 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1259 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1260 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1261 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1262 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1264 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1265 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1266 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1268 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1269 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1270 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1272 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1273 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1274 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1275 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1277 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1278 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1279 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1281 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1282 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1284 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1285 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1287 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1289 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1290 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1291 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1293 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1294 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1296 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1297 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1299 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1300 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1302 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1303 [present in the original version]
1306 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1310 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1312 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1313 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1314 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1316 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1317 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1319 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1323 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1324 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1326 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1327 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1329 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1330 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1332 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1333 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1334 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1335 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1336 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1337 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1339 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1340 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1343 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1344 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1346 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1349 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1350 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1351 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1353 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1354 directory is unreadable.
1356 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1357 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1358 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1360 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1361 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1362 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1363 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1364 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1367 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1368 Before it would print nothing.
1370 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1372 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1373 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1374 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1375 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1376 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1377 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1378 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1379 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1381 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1385 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1386 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1387 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1389 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1390 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1391 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1392 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1395 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1399 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1400 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1401 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1402 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1403 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1404 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1405 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1407 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1408 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1409 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1410 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1411 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1412 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1413 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1414 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1416 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1417 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1418 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1421 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1425 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1426 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1428 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1429 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1430 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1432 ** Improved robustness
1434 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1435 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1436 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1439 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1443 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1444 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1445 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1446 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1447 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1449 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1453 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1456 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1460 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1461 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1462 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1463 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1465 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1466 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1468 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1469 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1470 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1473 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1475 ** Improved robustness
1477 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1478 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1480 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1481 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1482 or NFS-mounted partition.
1484 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1485 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1489 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1490 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1491 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1492 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1493 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1494 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1496 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1497 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1499 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1500 or neglect to report file removal.
1502 For the "groups" command:
1504 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1505 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1507 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1509 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1511 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1515 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1516 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1519 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1521 ** Changes in behavior
1523 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1524 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1525 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1526 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1528 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1529 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1530 a final `./' or `../' component.
1532 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1533 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1534 this only for pipes.
1536 ** Infrastructure changes
1538 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1539 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1540 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1541 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1545 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1546 name is "." or "..".
1548 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1549 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1550 dirent.d_type support.
1552 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1553 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1555 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1556 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1557 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1558 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1561 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1563 ** Changes in behavior
1565 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1569 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1570 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1574 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1575 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1576 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1578 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1579 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1581 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1582 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1584 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1586 ** Improved robustness
1588 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1589 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1590 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1592 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1593 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1596 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1597 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1599 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1600 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1602 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1603 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1605 ** Changes in behavior
1607 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1608 where the two are distinct.
1610 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1611 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1612 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1613 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1614 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1615 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1616 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1617 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1618 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1619 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1620 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1621 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1622 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1623 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1624 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1625 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1626 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1628 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1629 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1630 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1632 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1633 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1634 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1635 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1638 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1639 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1643 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1644 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1645 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1646 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1648 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1649 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1650 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1652 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1653 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1654 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1655 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1656 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1659 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1660 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1662 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1663 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1664 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1665 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1667 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1668 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1669 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1671 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1672 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1673 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1674 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1676 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1677 and sticky) with the -m option.
1679 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1680 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1681 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1682 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1683 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1685 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1686 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1688 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1692 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1693 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1694 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1695 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1697 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1699 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1701 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1702 silently ignoring one of them.
1704 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1705 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1706 containing this change was 5.92.
1708 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1709 automatically newline terminated.
1711 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1712 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1713 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1714 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1717 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1718 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1719 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1722 ** Scheduled for removal
1724 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1725 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1727 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1728 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1729 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1730 command to unlink a directory.
1732 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1733 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1734 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1735 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1739 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1740 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1741 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1742 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1743 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1744 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1748 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1749 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1751 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1753 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1754 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1755 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1757 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1758 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1761 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1762 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1764 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1765 list directories before files.
1767 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1768 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1769 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1770 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1773 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1775 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1777 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1778 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1779 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1781 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1782 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1786 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1787 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1788 usually printing nothing.
1790 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1792 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1793 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1794 them with hard-linked directories.
1796 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1797 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1798 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1800 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1801 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1802 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1804 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1807 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1808 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1810 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1811 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1813 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1814 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1816 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1817 all command-line arguments.
1819 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1821 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1823 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1824 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1826 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1828 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1829 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1830 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1831 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1832 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1834 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1835 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1837 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1838 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1839 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1840 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1842 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1844 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1848 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1849 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1851 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1852 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1854 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1855 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1857 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1858 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1860 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1861 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1863 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1865 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1866 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1867 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1870 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1872 ** Build-related bug fixes
1874 installing .mo files would fail
1877 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1881 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1883 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1886 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1890 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1891 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1895 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1897 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1898 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1900 ** Deprecated options
1902 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1903 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1905 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1909 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1911 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1912 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1913 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1914 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1916 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1919 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1925 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1930 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1932 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1934 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1935 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1936 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1938 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1939 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1940 problematic usages. These include:
1942 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1943 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1944 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1945 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1946 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1947 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1948 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1949 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1950 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1952 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1953 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1955 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1956 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1957 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1958 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1960 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1961 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1962 between binary and text files.
1964 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1968 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1972 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1973 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1975 head tac tail tee tr
1976 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1978 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1979 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1981 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1982 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1983 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1985 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1987 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1989 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1990 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1991 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1995 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1997 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1998 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2000 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2001 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2002 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2006 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2007 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2011 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2012 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2013 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2017 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2018 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2022 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2024 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2026 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2030 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2031 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2032 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2034 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2035 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2036 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2037 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2038 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2040 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2044 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2045 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2046 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2048 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2050 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2051 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2052 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2053 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2055 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2057 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2058 rather than silently wrapping around.
2060 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2061 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2063 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2064 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2066 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2067 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2068 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2069 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2071 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2073 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2075 ** Improved robustness
2077 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2078 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2079 no matter how large the result.
2081 ** Improved portability
2083 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2084 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2086 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2088 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2089 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2090 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2092 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2093 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2097 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2098 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2100 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2102 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2103 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2104 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2105 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2107 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2108 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2110 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2111 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2112 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2114 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2116 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2117 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2119 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2120 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2122 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2124 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2125 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2127 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2128 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2130 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2131 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2132 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2134 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2136 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2138 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2142 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2144 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2145 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2146 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2148 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2149 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2151 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2152 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2153 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2155 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2156 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2158 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2159 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2160 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2161 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2163 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2164 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2166 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2167 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2168 the file system does not support it.
2170 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2172 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2173 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2175 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2177 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2178 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2180 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2181 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2182 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2183 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2185 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2186 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2189 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2190 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2191 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2192 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2194 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2195 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2196 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2197 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2199 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2200 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2202 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2204 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2205 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2206 reporting incorrect results.
2210 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2211 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2213 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2216 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2218 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2219 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2221 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2222 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2224 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2227 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2228 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2229 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2230 the file name does not look like a page range.
2232 printf has several changes:
2234 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2235 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2237 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2238 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2239 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2241 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2242 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2245 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2246 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2248 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2249 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2251 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2253 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2254 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2256 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2258 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2260 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2261 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2262 when first encountering the directory.
2266 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2267 output; POSIX requires this.
2269 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2270 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2272 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2274 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2275 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2277 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2278 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2280 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2281 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2282 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2283 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2284 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2285 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2286 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2288 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2289 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2290 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2292 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2293 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2295 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2297 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2299 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2300 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2301 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2302 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2304 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2308 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2309 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2310 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2311 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2312 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2314 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2315 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2316 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2318 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2319 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2321 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2322 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2324 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2325 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2326 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2327 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2328 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2330 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2331 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2333 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2334 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2336 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2338 nocreat do not create the output file
2339 excl fail if the output file already exists
2340 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2341 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2343 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2345 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2346 direct use direct I/O for data
2347 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2348 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2349 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2350 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2351 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2353 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2355 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2356 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2359 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2360 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2361 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2362 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2363 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2364 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2366 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2367 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2369 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2372 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2374 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2376 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2377 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2379 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2380 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2381 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2383 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2384 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2385 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2387 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2389 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2390 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2392 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2393 for compatibility with bash.
2395 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2397 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2398 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2399 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2400 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2402 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2403 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2405 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2406 ls supports TABSIZE.
2407 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2408 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2409 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2411 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2414 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2416 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2417 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2418 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2419 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2420 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2421 an offset, not as a file name.
2423 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2424 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2426 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2427 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2429 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2430 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2432 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2433 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2434 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2436 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2437 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2439 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2440 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2444 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2446 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2448 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2452 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2453 or more arguments between partitions.
2455 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2456 holes in the destination.
2458 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2459 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2460 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2461 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2462 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2463 terminates immediately.
2465 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2467 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2469 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2470 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2471 not the empty string.
2473 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2474 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2478 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2479 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2480 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2483 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2490 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2494 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2495 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2497 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2498 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2500 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2501 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2502 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2505 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2509 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2510 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2512 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2513 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2515 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2516 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2517 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2519 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2521 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2524 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2526 ** Configuration option
2528 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2529 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2533 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2534 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2538 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2539 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2540 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2543 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2544 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2545 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2546 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2547 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2548 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2549 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2552 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2556 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2557 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2558 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2560 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2561 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2563 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2565 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2566 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2567 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2568 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2570 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2572 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2573 not just the ones that reference directories
2575 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2576 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2578 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2579 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2580 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2582 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2583 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2584 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2585 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2586 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2587 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2589 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2594 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2595 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2597 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2599 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2601 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2603 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2604 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2606 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2607 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2609 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2611 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2615 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2617 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2619 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2620 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2621 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2622 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2623 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2625 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2626 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2628 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2629 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2631 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2632 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2634 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2635 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2636 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2640 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2641 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2642 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2643 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2644 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2645 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2646 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2647 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2648 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2649 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2650 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2651 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2652 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2653 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2655 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2657 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2658 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2660 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2662 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2664 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2665 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2667 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2669 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2670 without a trailing newline.
2672 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2673 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2675 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2678 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2682 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2684 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2686 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2687 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2688 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2689 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2691 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2693 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2694 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2695 be printed without leading spaces.
2697 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2698 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2703 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2704 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2705 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2707 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2709 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2710 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2712 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2713 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2715 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2716 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2718 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2720 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2722 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2724 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2725 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2727 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2729 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2731 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2732 byte offsets are specified.
2735 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2738 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2741 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2742 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2743 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2744 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2745 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2746 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2747 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2748 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2749 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2750 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2751 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2752 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2753 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2754 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2755 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2756 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2757 directory where M has write access.
2758 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2759 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2760 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2763 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2764 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2765 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2766 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2767 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2768 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2769 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2770 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2771 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2772 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2773 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2774 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2775 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2776 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2777 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2778 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2779 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2780 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2781 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2782 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2783 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2784 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2785 appeared one additional time.
2787 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2788 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2789 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2790 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2793 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2794 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2795 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2796 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2797 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2798 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2799 if there were more than 338.
2801 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2802 - false --help now exits nonzero
2805 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2806 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2807 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2808 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2811 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2812 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2813 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2814 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2815 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2818 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2819 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2820 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2821 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2822 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2823 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2824 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2827 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2828 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2829 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2830 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2831 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2832 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2834 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2835 under certain unusual conditions
2836 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2837 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2840 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2841 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2842 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2843 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2844 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2845 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2846 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2847 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2848 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2849 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2850 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2851 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2852 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2853 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2854 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2855 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2858 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2859 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2862 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2863 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2864 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2865 involving hard-linked directories
2866 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2867 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2868 character-special and block files
2871 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2872 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2873 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2874 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2875 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2876 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2877 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2878 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2879 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2881 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2882 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2883 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2884 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2885 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2886 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2887 specified on the command line.
2888 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2889 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2890 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2891 the first file untouched.
2892 * readlink: new program
2893 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2894 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2895 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2896 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2897 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2898 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2901 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2902 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2903 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2904 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2905 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2906 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2907 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2908 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2909 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2910 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2911 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2912 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2914 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2915 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2916 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2918 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2919 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2920 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2921 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2922 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2923 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2924 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2925 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2928 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2929 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2932 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2933 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2934 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2935 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2936 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2937 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2938 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2941 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2942 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2944 ========================================================================
2945 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2946 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2949 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2951 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2952 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2953 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2954 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2955 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2956 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2957 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2958 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2959 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2960 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2961 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2962 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2964 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2965 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2966 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2967 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2969 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2972 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2974 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2975 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2976 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2977 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2978 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2979 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2980 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2983 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2984 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2985 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2986 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2987 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2988 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2989 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2990 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2991 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2992 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2993 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2994 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2995 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2996 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2997 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2998 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3000 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3001 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3003 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3004 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3005 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3006 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3007 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3008 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3010 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3011 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3012 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3013 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3014 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3015 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3016 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3018 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3019 the source files in the following example:
3020 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3021 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3022 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3023 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3024 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3025 links between source files with --preserve=links
3026 * cp accepts new options:
3027 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3028 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3029 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3030 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3031 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3032 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3033 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3034 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3035 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3037 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3038 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3039 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3040 even though it's older than dest.
3041 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3042 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3043 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3044 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3045 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3047 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3048 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3049 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3050 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3051 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3052 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3053 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3055 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3056 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3057 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3059 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3060 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3061 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3062 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3063 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3064 This is the default.
3066 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3067 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3068 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3069 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3070 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3072 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3075 ========================================================================
3076 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3077 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3080 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3081 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3083 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3084 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3085 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3086 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3087 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3089 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3090 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3091 that specifies a non-directory
3094 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3095 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3096 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3097 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3098 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3099 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3100 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3101 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3102 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3103 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3104 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3105 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3106 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3107 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3108 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3109 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3110 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3111 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3112 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3113 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3114 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3115 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3116 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3117 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3119 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3120 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3121 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3123 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3125 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3126 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3128 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3129 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3130 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3131 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3132 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3134 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3135 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3136 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3137 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3138 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3140 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3142 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3143 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3144 * still more portability fixes
3145 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3146 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3148 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3150 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3152 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3154 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3155 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3156 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3157 there is any time remaining
3158 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3160 ========================================================================
3161 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3162 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3164 This package began as the union of the following:
3165 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3167 ========================================================================
3169 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3171 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3172 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3173 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3174 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3175 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3176 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.