1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
8 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
9 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
10 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
11 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
12 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
16 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
18 ** Changes in behavior
20 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
21 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
22 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
24 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
25 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
28 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
32 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
33 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
34 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
35 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
36 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
37 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
38 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
39 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
41 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
42 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
43 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
44 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
45 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
47 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
48 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
50 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
51 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
53 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
54 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
56 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
57 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
59 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
60 additional static suffix to output file names.
62 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
63 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
64 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
66 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
67 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
71 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
72 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
73 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
75 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
76 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
77 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
78 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
79 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
80 typically still point to one of the hard links.
82 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
83 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
84 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
85 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
86 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
88 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
89 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
90 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
91 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
95 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
96 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
97 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
99 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
100 instead of causing a usage failure.
102 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
105 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
109 realpath: print resolved file names.
113 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
114 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
116 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
117 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
119 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
120 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
121 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
122 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
123 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
124 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
126 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
127 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
128 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
130 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
131 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
132 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
134 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
135 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
136 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
137 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
138 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
140 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
142 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
143 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
145 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
146 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
147 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
149 ** Changes in behavior
151 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
152 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
153 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
154 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
155 usually-short referent instead.
157 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
158 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
159 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
160 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
163 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
167 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
168 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
169 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
171 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
172 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
174 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
175 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
179 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
180 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
182 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
183 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
184 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
185 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
187 ** Changes in behavior
189 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
190 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
191 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
195 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
196 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
197 only .tar.xz files is enough.
200 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
204 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
205 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
206 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
208 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
209 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
211 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
212 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
213 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
214 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
215 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
217 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
218 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
219 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
220 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
221 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
222 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
223 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
224 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
226 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
227 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
229 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
230 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
232 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
233 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
235 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
236 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
237 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
239 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
240 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
241 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
242 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
244 ** Changes in behavior
246 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
247 when -v or -c specified.
249 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
250 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
254 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
255 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
256 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
257 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
258 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
260 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
261 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
262 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
264 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
265 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
266 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
267 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
268 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
269 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
270 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
272 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
273 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
274 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
278 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
279 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
281 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
284 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
285 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
287 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
288 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
290 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
291 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
293 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
295 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
299 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
300 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
302 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
305 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
309 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
310 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
312 ** Changes in behavior
314 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
315 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
316 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
317 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
318 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
319 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
321 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
322 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
323 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
327 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
330 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
334 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
335 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
336 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
338 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
339 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
340 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
342 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
343 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
344 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
346 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
347 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
349 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
350 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
352 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
353 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
355 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
356 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
360 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
361 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
362 processed portion thereof.
364 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
365 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
367 ** Changes in behavior
369 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
370 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
371 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
373 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
374 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
375 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
377 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
378 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
380 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
381 Use --preserve-context instead.
383 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
386 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
390 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
391 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
392 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
393 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
394 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
396 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
397 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
399 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
400 reject file names invalid for that file system.
402 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
403 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
407 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
408 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
409 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
410 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
411 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
412 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
413 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
414 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
416 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
417 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
418 the same number of fields are output for each line.
420 ** Changes in behavior
422 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
423 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
424 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
427 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
431 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
432 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
433 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
436 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
440 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
441 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
443 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
444 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
446 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
447 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
449 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
450 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
451 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
452 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
454 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
455 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
457 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
458 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
459 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
461 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
463 ** Changes in behavior
465 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
466 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
467 to the number of available processors.
471 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
474 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
478 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
479 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
480 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
481 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
483 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
484 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
485 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
487 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
488 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
490 ** Changes in behavior
492 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
493 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
495 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
496 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
497 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
498 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
499 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
500 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
502 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
503 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
504 the same way as the others.
507 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
511 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
512 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
513 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
515 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
516 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
518 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
519 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
520 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
522 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
523 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
525 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
526 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
528 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
529 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
530 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
532 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
533 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
534 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
535 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
539 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
540 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
542 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
545 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
546 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
548 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
550 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
551 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
552 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
554 ** Changes in behavior
556 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
557 rather than its aliased target.
559 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
560 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
561 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
563 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
564 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
565 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
566 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
567 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
568 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
569 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
570 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
572 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
574 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
576 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
577 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
580 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
581 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
582 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
583 control like taskset for example.
585 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
587 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
588 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
589 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
590 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
591 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
592 includes %C when context information is available.
594 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
595 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
596 rather than a file system attribute.
598 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
599 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
600 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
601 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
603 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
604 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
605 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
607 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
608 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
609 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
612 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
616 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
617 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
619 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
621 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
622 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
624 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
625 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
626 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
627 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
629 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
630 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
631 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
635 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
636 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
638 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
639 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
640 duration after the initial signal was sent.
642 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
643 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
644 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
645 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
646 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
647 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
648 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
649 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
650 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
652 ** Changes in behavior
654 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
655 sequence when it would be a no-op.
657 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
658 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
661 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
665 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
666 of available processors, which may not have been the case
667 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
668 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
672 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
673 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
675 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
676 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
677 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
678 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
680 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
681 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
682 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
685 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
689 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
690 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
691 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
693 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
694 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
695 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
697 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
698 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
700 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
701 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
702 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
703 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
705 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
706 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
707 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
709 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
710 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
711 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
712 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
714 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
715 renamed-aside and then recreated.
716 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
718 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
719 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
720 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
721 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
723 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
724 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
725 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
727 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
728 processes will not intersperse their output.
729 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
732 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
736 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
737 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
739 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
740 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
742 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
743 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
744 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
745 the presence of the empty string argument.
746 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
748 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
749 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
750 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
751 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
753 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
754 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
756 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
757 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
758 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
760 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
761 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
762 and with a malicious user on the same system
763 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
764 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
767 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
771 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
772 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
773 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
775 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
776 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
777 offending directory and all "contents."
779 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
780 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
781 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
783 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
784 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
785 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
787 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
788 processes will not intersperse their output.
789 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
790 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
792 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
793 output the name of the file to stdout.
794 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
796 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
797 call fails with errno == EACCES.
798 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
800 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
801 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
804 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
805 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
806 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
808 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
809 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
810 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
811 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
812 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
813 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
815 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
816 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
817 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
818 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
820 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
821 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
823 ** Changes in behavior
825 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
826 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
827 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
828 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
829 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
831 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
832 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
833 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
834 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
836 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
838 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
839 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
840 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
841 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
842 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
846 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
850 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
851 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
853 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
854 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
856 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
857 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
858 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
860 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
861 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
864 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
868 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
869 when the source file doesn't have write access.
870 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
872 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
873 to accommodate leap seconds.
874 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
876 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
877 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
878 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
880 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
882 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
883 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
884 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
886 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
887 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
888 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
889 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
890 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
894 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
895 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
896 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
897 directory or a symlink to a directory.
899 ** Changes in behavior
901 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
902 environment variable is set.
904 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
905 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
906 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
910 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
911 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
912 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
913 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
915 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
916 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
917 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
918 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
922 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
923 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
924 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
926 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
927 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
928 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
929 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
930 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
931 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
934 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
935 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
938 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
942 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
943 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
944 and libraries tested at configure time.
945 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
947 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
948 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
950 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
951 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
953 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
954 printing a summary to stderr.
955 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
957 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
958 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
959 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
961 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
962 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
964 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
965 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
966 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
967 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
969 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
970 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
971 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
972 which is relatively unusual.
973 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
975 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
976 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
977 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
978 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
979 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
980 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
981 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
985 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
986 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
987 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
988 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
989 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
993 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
994 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
996 ** Changes in behavior
998 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
999 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1000 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1001 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1002 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1005 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1009 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1010 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1012 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1013 before data copying has started.
1015 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1016 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1018 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1019 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1020 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1021 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1023 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1024 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1025 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1026 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1028 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1033 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1034 for its standard streams.
1036 ** Changes in behavior
1038 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1039 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1040 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1041 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1042 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1043 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1045 ** Deprecated options
1047 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1048 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1052 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1054 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1055 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1056 a btrfs file system.
1058 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1060 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1061 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1063 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1064 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1067 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1071 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1072 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1073 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1074 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1076 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1077 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1078 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1079 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1080 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1085 make check: two tests have been corrected
1089 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1090 inherited from gnulib.
1093 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1097 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1098 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1099 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1100 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1102 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1103 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1105 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1107 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1108 systems without xattr support.
1110 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1111 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1112 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1114 ** Changes in behavior
1116 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1117 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1118 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1119 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1121 ** Improved robustness
1123 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1124 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1125 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1126 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1127 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1128 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1129 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1130 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1131 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1135 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1136 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1138 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1139 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1140 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1141 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1142 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1145 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1149 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1150 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1151 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1155 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1156 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1157 data was read, or on process exit.
1158 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1160 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1161 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1162 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1163 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1165 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1166 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1167 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1168 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1170 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1171 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1173 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1174 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1176 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1177 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1178 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1180 ** Changes in behavior
1182 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1183 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1184 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1186 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1187 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1189 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1190 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1191 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1194 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1198 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1200 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1201 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1202 install: Never copies xattrs
1204 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1205 from overwriting any existing destination file
1207 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1208 mode where this feature is available.
1210 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1211 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1212 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1213 do not modify the destination at all.
1215 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1217 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1221 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1222 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1224 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1226 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1227 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1229 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1230 processing the first file name
1232 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1233 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1234 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1235 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1237 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1238 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1240 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1241 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1244 ** Changes in behavior
1246 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1247 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1249 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1250 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1251 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1253 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1254 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1256 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1258 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1259 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1260 is still marked with a '+'.
1263 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1267 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1268 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1272 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1273 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1274 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1275 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1276 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1277 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1279 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1280 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1282 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1283 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1285 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1287 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1288 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1289 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1291 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1292 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1294 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1295 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1296 used to factor large numbers.
1298 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1301 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1303 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1305 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1306 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1308 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1309 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1310 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1311 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1313 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1314 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1315 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1317 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1318 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1322 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1324 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1325 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1327 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1328 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1330 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1332 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1333 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1337 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1338 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1339 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1341 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1343 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1344 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1345 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1347 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1348 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1349 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1351 ** Changes in behavior
1353 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1354 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1357 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1361 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1362 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1363 'futimens' system calls.
1367 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1369 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1370 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1371 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1373 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1374 with no USERNAME argument.
1376 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1377 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1378 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1380 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1381 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1382 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1383 number of fields for some inputs.
1385 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1386 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1388 ** Changes in behavior
1390 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1391 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1394 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1398 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1400 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1401 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1402 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1403 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1405 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1406 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1408 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1409 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1411 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1412 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1414 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1415 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1416 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1417 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1419 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1420 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1421 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1422 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1423 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1424 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1426 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1427 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1429 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1430 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1431 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1433 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1434 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1436 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1437 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1439 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1440 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1441 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1442 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1444 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1445 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1447 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1448 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1450 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1451 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1452 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1456 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1457 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1459 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1460 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1461 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1462 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1466 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1467 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1469 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1471 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1475 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1476 which have negative errno values.
1480 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1484 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1488 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1489 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1492 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1496 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1497 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1498 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1500 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1501 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1502 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1503 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1507 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1508 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1509 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1510 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1513 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1517 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1519 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1520 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1521 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1524 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1528 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1529 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1531 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1533 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1535 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1537 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1541 ** Changes in behavior
1543 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1544 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1546 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1547 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1549 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1550 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1551 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1555 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1556 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1557 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1558 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1559 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1560 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1561 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1562 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1563 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1564 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1565 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1567 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1568 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1569 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1572 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1575 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1576 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1577 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1579 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1580 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1581 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1584 ** New build options
1586 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1587 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1588 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1589 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1591 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1592 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1593 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1594 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1595 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1596 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1597 of "make check" fail.
1599 ** Remove deprecated options
1601 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1602 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1603 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1604 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1605 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1607 ** Improved robustness
1609 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1610 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1611 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1612 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1613 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1614 loss of the contents of a/f.
1616 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1617 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1621 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1622 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1623 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1625 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1626 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1627 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1628 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1630 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1631 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1632 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1633 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1634 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1635 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1636 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1637 destination is a symlink.
1639 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1641 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1642 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1644 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1645 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1647 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1649 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1650 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1652 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1653 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1655 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1658 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1659 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1661 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1662 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1664 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1665 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1666 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1667 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1669 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1670 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1671 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1673 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1674 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1675 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1677 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1678 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1679 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1680 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1682 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1683 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1684 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1686 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1687 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1689 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1690 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1692 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1694 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1695 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1696 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1698 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1699 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1701 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1702 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1704 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1705 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1707 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1708 [present in the original version]
1711 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1715 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1717 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1718 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1719 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1721 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1722 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1724 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1728 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1729 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1731 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1732 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1734 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1735 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1737 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1738 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1739 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1740 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1741 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1742 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1744 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1745 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1748 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1749 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1751 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1754 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1755 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1756 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1758 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1759 directory is unreadable.
1761 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1762 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1763 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1765 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1766 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1767 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1768 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1769 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1772 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1773 Before it would print nothing.
1775 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1777 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1778 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1779 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1780 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1781 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1782 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1783 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1784 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1786 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1790 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1791 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1792 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1794 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1795 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1796 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1797 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1800 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1804 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1805 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1806 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1807 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1808 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1809 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1810 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1812 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1813 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1814 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1815 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1816 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1817 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1818 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1819 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1821 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1822 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1823 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1826 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1830 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1831 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1833 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1834 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1835 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1837 ** Improved robustness
1839 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1840 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1841 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1844 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1848 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1849 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1850 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1851 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1852 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1854 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1858 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1861 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1865 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1866 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1867 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1868 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1870 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1871 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1873 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1874 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1875 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1878 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1880 ** Improved robustness
1882 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1883 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1885 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1886 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1887 or NFS-mounted partition.
1889 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1890 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1894 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1895 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1896 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1897 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1898 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1899 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1901 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1902 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1904 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1905 or neglect to report file removal.
1907 For the "groups" command:
1909 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1910 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1912 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1914 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1916 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1920 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1921 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1924 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1926 ** Changes in behavior
1928 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1929 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1930 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1931 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1933 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
1934 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1935 a final './' or '../' component.
1937 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1938 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1939 this only for pipes.
1941 ** Infrastructure changes
1943 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1944 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1945 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1946 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1950 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1951 name is "." or "..".
1953 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1954 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1955 dirent.d_type support.
1957 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1958 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1960 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1961 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1962 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1963 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1966 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1968 ** Changes in behavior
1970 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1974 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1975 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1979 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1980 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1981 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1983 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1984 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1986 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1987 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1989 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1991 ** Improved robustness
1993 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1994 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1995 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1997 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1998 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2001 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2002 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2004 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2005 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2007 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2008 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2010 ** Changes in behavior
2012 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2013 where the two are distinct.
2015 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2016 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2017 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2018 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2019 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2020 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2021 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2022 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2023 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2024 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2025 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2026 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2027 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2028 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2029 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2030 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2031 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2033 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2034 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2035 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2037 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2038 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2039 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2040 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2043 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2044 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2048 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2049 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2050 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2051 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2053 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2054 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2055 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2057 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2058 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2059 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2060 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2061 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2064 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2065 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2067 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2068 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2069 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2070 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2072 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2073 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2074 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2076 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2077 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2078 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2079 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2081 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2082 and sticky) with the -m option.
2084 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2085 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2086 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2087 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2088 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2090 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2091 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2093 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2097 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2098 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2099 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2100 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2102 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2104 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2106 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2107 silently ignoring one of them.
2109 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2110 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2111 containing this change was 5.92.
2113 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2114 automatically newline terminated.
2116 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2117 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2118 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2119 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2122 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2123 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2124 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2127 ** Scheduled for removal
2129 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2130 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2132 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2133 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2134 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2135 command to unlink a directory.
2137 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2138 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2139 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2140 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2144 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2145 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2146 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2147 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2148 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2149 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2153 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2154 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2156 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2158 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2159 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2160 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2162 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2163 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2166 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2167 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2169 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2170 list directories before files.
2172 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2173 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2174 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2175 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2178 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2180 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2182 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2183 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2184 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2186 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2187 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2191 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2192 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2193 usually printing nothing.
2195 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2197 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2198 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2199 them with hard-linked directories.
2201 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2202 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2203 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2205 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2206 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2207 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2209 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2212 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2213 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2215 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2216 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2218 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2219 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2221 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2222 all command-line arguments.
2224 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2226 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2228 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2229 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2231 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2233 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2234 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2235 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2236 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2237 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2239 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2240 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2242 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2243 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2244 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2245 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2247 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2249 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2253 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2254 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2256 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2257 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2259 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2260 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2262 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2263 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2265 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2266 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2268 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2270 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2271 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2272 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2275 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2277 ** Build-related bug fixes
2279 installing .mo files would fail
2282 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2286 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2288 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2291 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2295 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2296 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2300 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2302 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2303 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2305 ** Deprecated options
2307 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2308 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2310 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2314 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2316 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2317 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2318 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2319 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2321 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2324 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2330 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2335 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2337 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2339 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2340 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2341 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2343 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2344 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2345 problematic usages. These include:
2347 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2348 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2349 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2350 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2351 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2352 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2353 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2354 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2355 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2357 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2358 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2360 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2361 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2362 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2363 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2365 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2366 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2367 between binary and text files.
2369 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2373 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2377 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2378 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2380 head tac tail tee tr
2381 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2383 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2384 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2386 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2387 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2388 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2390 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2392 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2394 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2395 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2396 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2400 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2402 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2403 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2405 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2406 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2407 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2411 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2412 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2416 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2417 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2418 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2422 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2423 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2427 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2429 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2431 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2435 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2436 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2437 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2439 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2440 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2441 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2442 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2443 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2445 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2449 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2450 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2451 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2453 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2455 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2456 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2457 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2458 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2460 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2462 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2463 rather than silently wrapping around.
2465 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2466 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2468 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2469 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2471 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2472 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2473 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2474 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2476 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2478 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2480 ** Improved robustness
2482 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2483 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2484 no matter how large the result.
2486 ** Improved portability
2488 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2489 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2491 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2493 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2494 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2495 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2497 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2498 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2502 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2503 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2505 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2507 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2508 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2509 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2510 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2512 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2513 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2515 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2516 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2517 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2519 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2521 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2522 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2524 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2525 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2527 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2529 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2530 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2532 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2533 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2535 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2536 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2537 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2539 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2541 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2543 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2547 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2549 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2550 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2551 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2553 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2554 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2556 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2557 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2558 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2560 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2561 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2563 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2564 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2565 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2566 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2568 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2569 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2571 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2572 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2573 the file system does not support it.
2575 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2577 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2578 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2580 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2582 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2583 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2585 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2586 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2587 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2588 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2590 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2591 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2594 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2595 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2596 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2597 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2599 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2600 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2601 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2602 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2604 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2605 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2607 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2609 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2610 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2611 reporting incorrect results.
2615 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2616 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2618 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2621 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2623 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2624 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2626 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2627 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2629 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2632 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2633 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2634 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2635 the file name does not look like a page range.
2637 printf has several changes:
2639 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2640 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2642 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2643 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2644 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2646 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2647 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2650 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2651 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2653 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2654 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2656 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2658 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2659 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2661 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2663 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2665 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2666 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2667 when first encountering the directory.
2671 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2672 output; POSIX requires this.
2674 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2675 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2677 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2679 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2680 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2682 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2683 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2685 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2686 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2687 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2688 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2689 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2690 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2691 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2693 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2694 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2695 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2697 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2698 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2700 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2702 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2704 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2705 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2706 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2707 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2709 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2713 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2714 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2715 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2716 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
2717 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
2719 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2720 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2721 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2723 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2724 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2726 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2727 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2729 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2730 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2731 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2732 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2733 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2735 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2736 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2738 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2739 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2741 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2743 nocreat do not create the output file
2744 excl fail if the output file already exists
2745 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2746 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2748 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2750 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2751 direct use direct I/O for data
2752 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2753 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2754 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2755 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2756 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2758 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2760 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2761 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
2764 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2765 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2766 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2767 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2768 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2769 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2771 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2772 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2774 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2777 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2779 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2781 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2782 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2784 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2785 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2786 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2788 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2789 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2790 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2792 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2794 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2795 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2797 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2798 for compatibility with bash.
2800 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2802 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2803 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2804 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2805 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2807 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2808 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2810 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2811 ls supports TABSIZE.
2812 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2813 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2814 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2816 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2819 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2821 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2822 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2823 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2824 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2825 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2826 an offset, not as a file name.
2828 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2829 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2831 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2832 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2834 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2835 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2837 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2838 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2839 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2841 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2842 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2844 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2845 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2849 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2851 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2853 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2857 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2858 or more arguments between partitions.
2860 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2861 holes in the destination.
2863 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2864 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2865 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2866 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2867 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2868 terminates immediately.
2870 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2872 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2874 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2875 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2876 not the empty string.
2878 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2879 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2883 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2884 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2885 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
2888 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2895 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2899 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2900 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
2902 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2903 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2905 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2906 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2907 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2910 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2914 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2915 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2917 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2918 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2920 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2921 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2922 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2924 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2926 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2929 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2931 ** Configuration option
2933 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2934 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2938 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2939 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2943 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2944 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2945 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2948 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2949 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2950 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2951 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2952 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2953 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2954 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2957 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2961 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2962 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2963 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2965 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2966 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2968 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2970 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2971 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2972 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2973 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2975 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2977 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2978 not just the ones that reference directories
2980 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2981 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2983 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2984 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2985 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2987 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2988 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2989 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2990 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2991 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2992 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2994 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2999 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3000 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3002 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3004 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3006 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3008 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3009 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3011 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3012 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3014 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3016 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3020 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3022 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3024 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3025 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3026 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3027 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3028 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3030 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3031 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3033 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3034 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3036 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3037 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3039 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3040 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3041 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3045 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3046 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3047 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3048 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3049 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3050 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3051 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3052 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3053 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3054 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3055 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3056 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3057 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3058 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3060 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3062 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3063 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3065 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3067 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3069 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3070 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3072 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3074 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3075 without a trailing newline.
3077 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3078 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3080 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3083 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3087 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3089 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3091 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3092 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3093 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3094 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3096 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3098 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3099 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3100 be printed without leading spaces.
3102 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3103 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3108 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3109 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3110 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3112 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3114 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3115 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3117 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3118 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3120 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3121 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3123 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3125 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3127 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3129 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3130 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3132 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3134 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3136 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3137 byte offsets are specified.
3140 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3143 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3146 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3147 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3148 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3149 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3150 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3151 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3152 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3153 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3154 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3155 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3156 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3157 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3158 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3159 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3160 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3161 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3162 directory where M has write access.
3163 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3164 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3165 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3168 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3169 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3170 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3171 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3172 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3173 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3174 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3175 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3176 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3177 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3178 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3179 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3180 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3181 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3182 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3183 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3184 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3185 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3186 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3187 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3188 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3189 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3190 appeared one additional time.
3192 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3193 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3194 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3195 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3198 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3199 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3200 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3201 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3202 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3203 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3204 if there were more than 338.
3206 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3207 - false --help now exits nonzero
3210 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3211 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3212 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3213 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3216 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3217 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3218 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3219 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3220 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3223 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3224 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3225 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3226 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3227 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3228 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3229 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3232 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3233 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3234 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3235 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3236 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3237 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3239 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3240 under certain unusual conditions
3241 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3242 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3245 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3246 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3247 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3248 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3249 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3250 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3251 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3252 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3253 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3254 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3255 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3256 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3257 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3258 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3259 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3260 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3263 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3264 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3267 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3268 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3269 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3270 involving hard-linked directories
3271 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3272 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3273 character-special and block files
3276 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3277 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3278 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3279 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3280 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3281 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3282 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3283 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3284 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3286 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3287 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3288 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3289 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3290 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3291 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3292 specified on the command line.
3293 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3294 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3295 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3296 the first file untouched.
3297 * readlink: new program
3298 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3299 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3300 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3301 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3302 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3303 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3306 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3307 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3308 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3309 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3310 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3311 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3312 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3313 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3314 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3315 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3316 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3317 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3319 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3320 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3321 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3323 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3324 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3325 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3326 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3327 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3328 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3329 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3330 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3333 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3334 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3337 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3338 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3339 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3340 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3341 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3342 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3343 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3346 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3347 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3349 ========================================================================
3350 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3351 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3354 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3356 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3357 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3358 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3359 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3360 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3361 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3362 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3363 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3364 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3365 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3366 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3367 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3369 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3370 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3371 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3372 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3374 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3377 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3379 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3380 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3381 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3382 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3383 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3384 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3385 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3388 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3389 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3390 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3391 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3392 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3393 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3394 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3395 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3396 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3397 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3398 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3399 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3400 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3401 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3402 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3403 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3405 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3406 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3408 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3409 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3410 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3411 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3412 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3413 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3415 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3416 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3417 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3418 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3419 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3420 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3421 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3423 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3424 the source files in the following example:
3425 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3426 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3427 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3428 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3429 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3430 links between source files with --preserve=links
3431 * cp accepts new options:
3432 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3433 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3434 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3435 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3436 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3437 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3438 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3439 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3440 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3442 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3443 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3444 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3445 even though it's older than dest.
3446 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3447 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3448 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3449 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3450 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3452 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3453 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3454 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3455 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3456 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3457 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3458 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3460 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3461 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3462 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3464 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3465 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3466 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3467 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3468 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3469 This is the default.
3471 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3472 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3473 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3474 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3475 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3477 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3480 ========================================================================
3481 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3482 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3485 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3486 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3488 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3489 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3490 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3491 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3492 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3494 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3495 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3496 that specifies a non-directory
3499 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3500 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3501 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3502 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3503 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3504 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3505 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3506 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3507 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3508 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3509 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3510 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3511 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3512 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3513 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3514 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3515 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3516 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3517 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3518 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3519 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3520 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3521 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3522 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3524 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3525 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3526 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3528 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3530 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3531 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3533 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3534 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3535 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3536 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3537 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3539 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3540 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3541 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3542 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3543 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3545 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3547 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3548 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3549 * still more portability fixes
3550 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3551 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3553 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3555 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3557 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3559 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3560 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3561 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3562 there is any time remaining
3563 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3565 ========================================================================
3566 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3567 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3569 This package began as the union of the following:
3570 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3572 ========================================================================
3574 Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3576 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3577 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3578 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3579 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3580 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3581 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.