1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
8 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
9 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
11 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
12 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
14 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
15 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
17 ** Changes in behavior
19 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
20 when -v or -c specified.
24 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
25 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
26 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
27 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
28 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
29 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
30 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
32 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
33 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
34 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
38 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
39 For example `shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2` no longer exhausts memory.
41 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
44 stat -f now also recognizes the GPFS file system type.
48 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
49 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
52 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
56 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
57 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
59 ** Changes in behavior
61 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
62 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
63 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
64 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
65 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
66 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
68 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
69 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
70 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
74 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
77 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
81 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
82 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
83 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
85 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
86 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
87 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
89 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
90 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
91 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
93 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
94 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
96 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
97 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
99 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
100 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
102 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
103 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
107 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
108 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
109 processed portion thereof.
111 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
112 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
114 ** Changes in behavior
116 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
117 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
118 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
120 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
121 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
122 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
124 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
125 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
127 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
128 Use --preserve-context instead.
130 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
133 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
137 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
138 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
139 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
140 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
141 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
143 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
144 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
146 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
147 reject file names invalid for that file system.
149 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
150 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
154 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
155 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
156 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
157 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
158 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
159 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
160 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
161 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
163 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
164 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
165 the same number of fields are output for each line.
167 ** Changes in behavior
169 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
170 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
171 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
174 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
178 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
179 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
180 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
183 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
187 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
188 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
190 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
191 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
193 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
194 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
196 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
197 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
198 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
199 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
201 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
202 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
204 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
205 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
206 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
208 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
210 ** Changes in behavior
212 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
213 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
214 to the number of available processors.
218 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
221 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
225 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
226 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
227 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
228 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
230 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
231 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
232 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
234 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
235 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
237 ** Changes in behavior
239 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
240 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
242 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
243 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
244 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
245 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
246 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
247 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
249 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
250 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
251 the same way as the others.
254 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
258 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
259 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
260 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
262 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
263 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
265 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
266 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
267 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
269 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
270 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
272 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
273 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
275 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
276 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
277 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
279 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
280 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
281 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
282 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
286 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
287 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
289 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
292 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
293 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
295 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
297 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
298 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
299 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
301 ** Changes in behavior
303 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
304 rather than its aliased target.
306 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
307 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
308 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
310 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
311 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
312 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
313 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
314 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
315 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
316 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
317 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
319 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
321 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
323 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
324 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
327 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
328 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
329 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
330 control like taskset for example.
332 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
334 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
335 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
336 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
337 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
338 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
339 includes %C when context information is available.
341 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
342 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
343 rather than a file system attribute.
345 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
346 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
347 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
348 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
350 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
351 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
352 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
354 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
355 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
356 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
359 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
363 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
364 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
366 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
368 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
369 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
371 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
372 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
373 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
374 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
376 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
377 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
378 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
382 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
383 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
385 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
386 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
387 duration after the initial signal was sent.
389 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
390 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
391 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
392 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
393 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
394 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
395 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
396 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
397 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
399 ** Changes in behavior
401 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
402 sequence when it would be a no-op.
404 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
405 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
408 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
412 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
413 of available processors, which may not have been the case
414 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
415 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
419 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
420 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
422 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
423 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
424 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
425 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
427 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
428 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
429 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
432 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
436 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
437 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
438 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
440 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
441 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
442 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
444 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
445 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
447 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
448 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
449 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
450 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
452 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
453 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
454 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
456 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
457 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
458 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
459 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
461 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
462 renamed-aside and then recreated.
463 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
465 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
466 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
467 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
468 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
470 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
471 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
472 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
474 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
475 processes will not intersperse their output.
476 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
479 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
483 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
484 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
486 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
487 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
489 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
490 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
491 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
492 the presence of the empty string argument.
493 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
495 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
496 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
497 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
498 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
500 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
501 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
503 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
504 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
505 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
507 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
508 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
509 and with a malicious user on the same system
510 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
511 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
514 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
518 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
519 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
520 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
522 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
523 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
524 offending directory and all "contents."
526 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
527 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
528 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
530 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
531 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
532 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
534 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
535 processes will not intersperse their output.
536 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
537 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
539 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
540 output the name of the file to stdout.
541 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
543 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
544 call fails with errno == EACCES.
545 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
547 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
548 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
551 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
552 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
553 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
555 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
556 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
557 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
558 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
559 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
560 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
562 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
563 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
564 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
565 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
567 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
568 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
570 ** Changes in behavior
572 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
573 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
574 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
575 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
576 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
578 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
579 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
580 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
581 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
583 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
585 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
586 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
587 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
588 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
589 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
593 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
597 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
598 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
600 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
601 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
603 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
604 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
605 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
607 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
608 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
611 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
615 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
616 when the source file doesn't have write access.
617 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
619 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
620 to accommodate leap seconds.
621 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
623 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
624 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
625 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
627 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
629 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
630 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
631 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
633 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
634 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
635 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
636 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
637 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
641 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
642 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
643 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
644 directory or a symlink to a directory.
646 ** Changes in behavior
648 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
649 environment variable is set.
651 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
652 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
653 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
657 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
658 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
659 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
660 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
662 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
663 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
664 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
665 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
669 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
670 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
671 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
673 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
674 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
675 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
676 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
677 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
678 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
681 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
682 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
685 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
689 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
690 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
691 and libraries tested at configure time.
692 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
694 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
695 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
697 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
698 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
700 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
701 printing a summary to stderr.
702 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
704 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
705 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
706 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
708 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
709 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
711 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
712 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
713 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
714 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
716 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
717 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
718 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
719 which is relatively unusual.
720 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
722 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
723 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
724 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
725 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
726 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
727 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
728 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
732 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
733 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
734 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
735 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
736 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
740 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
741 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
743 ** Changes in behavior
745 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
746 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
747 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
748 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
749 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
752 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
756 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
757 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
759 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
760 before data copying has started.
762 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
763 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
765 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
766 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
767 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
768 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
770 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
771 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
772 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
773 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
775 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
780 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
781 for its standard streams.
783 ** Changes in behavior
785 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
786 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
787 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
788 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
789 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
790 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
792 ** Deprecated options
794 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
795 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
799 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
801 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
802 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
805 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
807 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
808 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
810 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
811 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
814 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
818 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
819 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
820 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
821 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
823 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
824 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
825 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
826 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
827 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
832 make check: two tests have been corrected
836 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
837 inherited from gnulib.
840 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
844 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
845 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
846 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
847 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
849 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
850 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
852 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
854 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
855 systems without xattr support.
857 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
858 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
859 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
861 ** Changes in behavior
863 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
864 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
865 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
866 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
868 ** Improved robustness
870 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
871 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
872 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
873 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
874 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
875 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
876 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
877 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
878 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
882 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
883 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
885 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
886 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
887 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
888 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
889 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
892 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
896 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
897 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
898 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
902 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
903 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
904 data was read, or on process exit.
905 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
907 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
908 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
909 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
910 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
912 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
913 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
914 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
915 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
917 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
918 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
920 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
921 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
923 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
924 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
925 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
927 ** Changes in behavior
929 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
930 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
931 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
933 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
934 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
936 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
937 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
938 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
941 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
945 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
947 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
948 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
949 install: Never copies xattrs
951 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
952 from overwriting any existing destination file
954 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
955 mode where this feature is available.
957 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
958 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
959 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
960 do not modify the destination at all.
962 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
964 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
968 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
969 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
971 cp uses much less memory in some situations
973 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
974 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
976 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
977 processing the first file name
979 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
980 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
981 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
982 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
984 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
985 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
987 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
988 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
991 ** Changes in behavior
993 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
994 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
996 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
997 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
998 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1000 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1001 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1003 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1005 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1006 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1007 is still marked with a '+'.
1010 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1014 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1015 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1019 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1020 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1021 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1022 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1023 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1024 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1026 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1027 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1029 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1030 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1032 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1034 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1035 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1036 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1038 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1039 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1041 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1042 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1043 used to factor large numbers.
1045 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1048 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1050 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1052 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1053 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1055 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1056 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1057 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1058 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1060 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1061 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1062 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1064 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1065 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1069 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1071 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1072 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1074 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1075 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1077 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1079 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1080 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1084 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1085 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1086 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1088 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1090 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1091 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1092 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1094 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1095 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1096 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1098 ** Changes in behavior
1100 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1101 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1104 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1108 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1110 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1111 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1112 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1114 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1115 with no USERNAME argument.
1117 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1118 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1119 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1121 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1122 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1123 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1124 number of fields for some inputs.
1126 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1127 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1129 ** Changes in behavior
1131 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1132 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1135 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1139 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1141 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1142 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1143 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1144 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1146 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1147 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1149 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1150 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1152 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1153 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1155 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1156 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1157 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1158 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1160 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1161 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1162 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1163 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1164 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1165 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1167 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1168 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1170 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1171 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1172 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1174 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1175 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1177 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1178 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1180 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1181 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1182 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1183 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1185 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1186 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1188 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1189 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1191 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1192 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1193 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1197 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1198 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1200 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1201 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1202 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1203 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1207 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1208 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1210 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1212 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1216 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1217 which have negative errno values.
1221 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1225 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1229 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1230 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1233 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1237 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1238 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1239 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1241 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1242 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1243 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1244 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1248 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1249 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1250 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1251 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1254 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1258 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1260 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1261 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1262 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1265 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1269 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1270 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1272 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1274 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1276 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1278 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1282 ** Changes in behavior
1284 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1285 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1287 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1288 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1290 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1291 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1292 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1296 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1297 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1298 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1299 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1300 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1301 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1302 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1303 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1304 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1305 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1306 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1308 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1309 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1310 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1313 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1316 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1317 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1318 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1320 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1321 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1322 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1325 ** New build options
1327 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1328 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1329 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1330 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1332 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1333 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1334 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1335 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1336 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1337 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1338 of "make check" fail.
1340 ** Remove deprecated options
1342 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1343 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1344 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1345 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1346 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1348 ** Improved robustness
1350 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1351 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1352 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1353 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1354 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1355 loss of the contents of a/f.
1357 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1358 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1362 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1363 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1364 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1366 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1367 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1368 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1369 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1371 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1372 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1373 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1374 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1375 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1376 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1377 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1378 destination is a symlink.
1380 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1382 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1383 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1385 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1386 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1388 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1390 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1391 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1393 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1394 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1396 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1399 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1400 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1402 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1403 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1405 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1406 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1407 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1408 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1410 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1411 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1412 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1414 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1415 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1416 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1418 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1419 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1420 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1421 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1423 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1424 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1425 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1427 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1428 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1430 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1431 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1433 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1435 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1436 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1437 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1439 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1440 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1442 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1443 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1445 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1446 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1448 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1449 [present in the original version]
1452 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1456 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1458 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1459 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1460 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1462 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1463 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1465 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1469 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1470 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1472 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1473 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1475 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1476 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1478 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1479 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1480 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1481 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1482 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1483 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1485 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1486 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1489 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1490 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1492 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1495 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1496 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1497 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1499 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1500 directory is unreadable.
1502 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1503 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1504 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1506 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1507 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1508 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1509 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1510 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1513 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1514 Before it would print nothing.
1516 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1518 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1519 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1520 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1521 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1522 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1523 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1524 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1525 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1527 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1531 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1532 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1533 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1535 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1536 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1537 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1538 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1541 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1545 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1546 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1547 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1548 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1549 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1550 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1551 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1553 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1554 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1555 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1556 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1557 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1558 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1559 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1560 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1562 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1563 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1564 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1567 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1571 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1572 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1574 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1575 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1576 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1578 ** Improved robustness
1580 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1581 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1582 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1585 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1589 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1590 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1591 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1592 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1593 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1595 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1599 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1602 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1606 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1607 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1608 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1609 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1611 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1612 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1614 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1615 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1616 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1619 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1621 ** Improved robustness
1623 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1624 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1626 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1627 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1628 or NFS-mounted partition.
1630 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1631 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1635 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1636 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1637 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1638 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1639 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1640 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1642 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1643 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1645 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1646 or neglect to report file removal.
1648 For the "groups" command:
1650 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1651 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1653 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1655 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1657 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1661 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1662 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1665 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1667 ** Changes in behavior
1669 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1670 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1671 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1672 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1674 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1675 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1676 a final `./' or `../' component.
1678 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1679 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1680 this only for pipes.
1682 ** Infrastructure changes
1684 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1685 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1686 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1687 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1691 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1692 name is "." or "..".
1694 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1695 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1696 dirent.d_type support.
1698 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1699 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1701 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1702 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1703 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1704 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1707 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1709 ** Changes in behavior
1711 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1715 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1716 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1720 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1721 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1722 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1724 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1725 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1727 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1728 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1730 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1732 ** Improved robustness
1734 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1735 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1736 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1738 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1739 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1742 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1743 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1745 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1746 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1748 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1749 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1751 ** Changes in behavior
1753 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1754 where the two are distinct.
1756 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1757 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1758 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1759 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1760 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1761 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1762 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1763 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1764 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1765 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1766 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1767 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1768 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1769 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1770 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1771 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1772 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1774 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1775 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1776 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1778 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1779 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1780 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1781 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1784 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1785 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1789 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1790 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1791 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1792 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1794 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1795 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1796 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1798 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1799 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1800 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1801 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1802 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1805 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1806 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1808 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1809 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1810 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1811 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1813 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1814 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1815 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1817 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1818 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1819 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1820 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1822 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1823 and sticky) with the -m option.
1825 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1826 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1827 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1828 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1829 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1831 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1832 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1834 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1838 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1839 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1840 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1841 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1843 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1845 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1847 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1848 silently ignoring one of them.
1850 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1851 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1852 containing this change was 5.92.
1854 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1855 automatically newline terminated.
1857 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1858 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1859 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1860 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1863 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1864 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1865 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1868 ** Scheduled for removal
1870 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1871 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1873 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1874 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1875 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1876 command to unlink a directory.
1878 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1879 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1880 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1881 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1885 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1886 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1887 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1888 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1889 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1890 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1894 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1895 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1897 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1899 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1900 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1901 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1903 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1904 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1907 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1908 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1910 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1911 list directories before files.
1913 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1914 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1915 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1916 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1919 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1921 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1923 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1924 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1925 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1927 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1928 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1932 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1933 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1934 usually printing nothing.
1936 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1938 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1939 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1940 them with hard-linked directories.
1942 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1943 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1944 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1946 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1947 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1948 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1950 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1953 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1954 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1956 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1957 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1959 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1960 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1962 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1963 all command-line arguments.
1965 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1967 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1969 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1970 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1972 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1974 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1975 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1976 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1977 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1978 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1980 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1981 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1983 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1984 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1985 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1986 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1988 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1990 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1994 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1995 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1997 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1998 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2000 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
2001 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2003 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2004 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
2006 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2007 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2009 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2011 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2012 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2013 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2016 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2018 ** Build-related bug fixes
2020 installing .mo files would fail
2023 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2027 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2029 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2032 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2036 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2037 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2041 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2043 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2044 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2046 ** Deprecated options
2048 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2049 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
2051 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2055 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2057 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2058 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2059 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2060 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2062 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2065 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2071 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2076 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2078 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2080 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2081 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2082 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2084 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2085 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2086 problematic usages. These include:
2088 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2089 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2090 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2091 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2092 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2093 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2094 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2095 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2096 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2098 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2099 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2101 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2102 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2103 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2104 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2106 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2107 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2108 between binary and text files.
2110 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2114 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2118 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2119 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2121 head tac tail tee tr
2122 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2124 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2125 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2127 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2128 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2129 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2131 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2133 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2135 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2136 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2137 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2141 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2143 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2144 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2146 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2147 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2148 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2152 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2153 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2157 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2158 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2159 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2163 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2164 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2168 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2170 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2172 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2176 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2177 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2178 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2180 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2181 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2182 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2183 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2184 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2186 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2190 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2191 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2192 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2194 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2196 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2197 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2198 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2199 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2201 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2203 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2204 rather than silently wrapping around.
2206 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2207 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2209 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2210 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2212 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2213 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2214 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2215 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2217 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2219 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2221 ** Improved robustness
2223 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2224 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2225 no matter how large the result.
2227 ** Improved portability
2229 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2230 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2232 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2234 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2235 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2236 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2238 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2239 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2243 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2244 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2246 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2248 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2249 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2250 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2251 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2253 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2254 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2256 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2257 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2258 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2260 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2262 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2263 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2265 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2266 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2268 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2270 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2271 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2273 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2274 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2276 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2277 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2278 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2280 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2282 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2284 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2288 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2290 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2291 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2292 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2294 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2295 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2297 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2298 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2299 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2301 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2302 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2304 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2305 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2306 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2307 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2309 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2310 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2312 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2313 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2314 the file system does not support it.
2316 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2318 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2319 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2321 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2323 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2324 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2326 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2327 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2328 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2329 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2331 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2332 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2335 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2336 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2337 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2338 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2340 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2341 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2342 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2343 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2345 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2346 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2348 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2350 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2351 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2352 reporting incorrect results.
2356 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2357 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2359 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2362 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2364 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2365 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2367 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2368 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2370 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2373 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2374 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2375 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2376 the file name does not look like a page range.
2378 printf has several changes:
2380 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2381 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2383 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2384 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2385 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2387 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2388 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2391 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2392 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2394 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2395 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2397 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2399 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2400 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2402 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2404 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2406 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2407 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2408 when first encountering the directory.
2412 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2413 output; POSIX requires this.
2415 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2416 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2418 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2420 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2421 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2423 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2424 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2426 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2427 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2428 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2429 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2430 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2431 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2432 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2434 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2435 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2436 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2438 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2439 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2441 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2443 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2445 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2446 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2447 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2448 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2450 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2454 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2455 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2456 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2457 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2458 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2460 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2461 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2462 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2464 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2465 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2467 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2468 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2470 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2471 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2472 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2473 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2474 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2476 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2477 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2479 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2480 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2482 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2484 nocreat do not create the output file
2485 excl fail if the output file already exists
2486 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2487 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2489 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2491 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2492 direct use direct I/O for data
2493 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2494 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2495 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2496 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2497 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2499 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2501 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2502 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2505 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2506 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2507 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2508 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2509 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2510 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2512 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2513 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2515 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2518 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2520 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2522 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2523 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2525 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2526 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2527 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2529 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2530 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2531 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2533 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2535 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2536 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2538 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2539 for compatibility with bash.
2541 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2543 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2544 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2545 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2546 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2548 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2549 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2551 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2552 ls supports TABSIZE.
2553 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2554 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2555 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2557 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2560 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2562 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2563 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2564 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2565 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2566 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2567 an offset, not as a file name.
2569 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2570 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2572 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2573 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2575 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2576 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2578 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2579 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2580 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2582 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2583 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2585 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2586 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2590 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2592 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2594 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2598 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2599 or more arguments between partitions.
2601 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2602 holes in the destination.
2604 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2605 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2606 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2607 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2608 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2609 terminates immediately.
2611 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2613 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2615 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2616 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2617 not the empty string.
2619 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2620 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2624 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2625 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2626 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2629 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2636 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2640 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2641 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2643 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2644 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2646 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2647 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2648 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2651 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2655 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2656 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2658 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2659 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2661 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2662 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2663 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2665 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2667 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2670 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2672 ** Configuration option
2674 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2675 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2679 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2680 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2684 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2685 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2686 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2689 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2690 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2691 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2692 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2693 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2694 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2695 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2698 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2702 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2703 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2704 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2706 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2707 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2709 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2711 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2712 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2713 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2714 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2716 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2718 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2719 not just the ones that reference directories
2721 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2722 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2724 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2725 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2726 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2728 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2729 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2730 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2731 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2732 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2733 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2735 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2740 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2741 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2743 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2745 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2747 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2749 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2750 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2752 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2753 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2755 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2757 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2761 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2763 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2765 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2766 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2767 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2768 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2769 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2771 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2772 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2774 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2775 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2777 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2778 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2780 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2781 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2782 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2786 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2787 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2788 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2789 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2790 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2791 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2792 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2793 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2794 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2795 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2796 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2797 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2798 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2799 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2801 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2803 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2804 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2806 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2808 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2810 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2811 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2813 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2815 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2816 without a trailing newline.
2818 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2819 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2821 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2824 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2828 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2830 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2832 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2833 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2834 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2835 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2837 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2839 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2840 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2841 be printed without leading spaces.
2843 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2844 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2849 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2850 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2851 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2853 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2855 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2856 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2858 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2859 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2861 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2862 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2864 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2866 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2868 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2870 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2871 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2873 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2875 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2877 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2878 byte offsets are specified.
2881 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2884 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2887 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2888 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2889 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2890 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2891 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2892 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2893 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2894 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2895 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2896 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2897 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2898 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2899 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2900 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2901 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2902 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2903 directory where M has write access.
2904 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2905 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2906 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2909 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2910 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2911 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2912 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2913 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2914 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2915 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2916 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2917 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2918 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2919 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2920 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2921 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2922 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2923 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2924 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2925 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2926 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2927 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2928 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2929 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2930 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2931 appeared one additional time.
2933 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2934 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2935 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2936 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2939 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2940 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2941 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2942 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2943 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2944 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2945 if there were more than 338.
2947 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2948 - false --help now exits nonzero
2951 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2952 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2953 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2954 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2957 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2958 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2959 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2960 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2961 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2964 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2965 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2966 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2967 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2968 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2969 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2970 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2973 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2974 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2975 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2976 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2977 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2978 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2980 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2981 under certain unusual conditions
2982 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2983 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2986 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2987 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2988 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2989 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2990 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2991 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2992 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2993 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2994 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2995 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2996 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2997 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2998 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2999 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3000 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3001 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3004 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3005 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3008 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3009 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3010 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3011 involving hard-linked directories
3012 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3013 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
3014 character-special and block files
3017 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3018 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3019 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3020 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3021 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3022 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3023 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3024 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3025 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3027 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
3028 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
3029 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3030 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3031 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3032 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3033 specified on the command line.
3034 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3035 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
3036 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3037 the first file untouched.
3038 * readlink: new program
3039 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3040 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3041 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3042 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3043 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3044 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3047 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3048 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3049 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3050 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3051 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3052 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3053 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3054 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3055 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3056 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3057 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3058 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3060 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3061 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3062 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3064 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3065 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3066 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3067 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3068 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3069 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3070 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3071 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3074 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3075 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3078 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3079 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3080 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3081 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3082 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3083 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3084 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3087 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3088 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3090 ========================================================================
3091 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3092 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3095 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3097 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3098 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3099 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3100 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3101 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3102 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3103 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3104 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3105 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3106 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3107 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3108 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3110 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3111 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3112 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3113 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3115 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3118 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3120 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3121 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3122 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3123 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3124 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3125 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3126 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3129 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3130 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3131 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3132 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3133 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3134 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3135 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3136 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3137 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3138 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3139 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3140 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3141 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3142 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3143 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3144 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3146 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3147 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3149 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3150 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3151 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3152 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3153 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3154 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3156 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3157 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3158 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3159 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3160 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3161 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3162 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3164 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3165 the source files in the following example:
3166 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3167 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3168 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3169 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3170 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3171 links between source files with --preserve=links
3172 * cp accepts new options:
3173 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3174 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3175 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3176 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3177 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3178 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3179 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3180 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3181 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3183 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3184 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3185 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3186 even though it's older than dest.
3187 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3188 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3189 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3190 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3191 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3193 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3194 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3195 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3196 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3197 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3198 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3199 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3201 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3202 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3203 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3205 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3206 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3207 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3208 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3209 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3210 This is the default.
3212 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3213 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3214 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3215 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3216 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3218 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3221 ========================================================================
3222 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3223 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3226 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3227 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3229 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3230 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3231 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3232 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3233 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3235 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3236 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3237 that specifies a non-directory
3240 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3241 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3242 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3243 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3244 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3245 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3246 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3247 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3248 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3249 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3250 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3251 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3252 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3253 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3254 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3255 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3256 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3257 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3258 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3259 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3260 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3261 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3262 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3263 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3265 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3266 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3267 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3269 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3271 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3272 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3274 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3275 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3276 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3277 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3278 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3280 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3281 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3282 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3283 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3284 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3286 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3288 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3289 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3290 * still more portability fixes
3291 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3292 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3294 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3296 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3298 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3300 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3301 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3302 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3303 there is any time remaining
3304 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3306 ========================================================================
3307 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3308 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3310 This package began as the union of the following:
3311 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3313 ========================================================================
3315 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3317 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3318 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3319 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3320 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3321 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3322 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.