1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
8 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
9 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
10 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
11 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
13 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
14 reject file names invalid for that file system.
16 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
17 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
20 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
24 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
25 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
26 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
29 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
33 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
34 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
36 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
37 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
39 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
40 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
42 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
43 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
44 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
45 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
47 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
48 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
50 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
51 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
52 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
54 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
56 ** Changes in behavior
58 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
59 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
60 to the number of available processors.
64 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
67 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
71 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
72 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
73 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
74 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
76 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
77 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
78 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
80 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
81 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
83 ** Changes in behavior
85 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
86 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
88 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
89 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
90 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
91 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
92 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
93 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
95 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
96 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
97 the same way as the others.
100 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
104 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
105 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
106 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
108 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
109 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
111 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
112 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
113 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
115 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
116 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
118 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
119 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
121 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
122 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
123 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
125 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
126 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
127 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
128 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
132 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
133 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
135 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
138 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
139 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
141 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
143 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
144 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
145 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
147 ** Changes in behavior
149 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
150 rather than its aliased target.
152 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
153 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
154 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
156 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
157 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
158 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
159 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
160 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
161 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
162 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
163 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
165 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
167 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
169 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
170 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
173 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
174 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
175 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
176 control like taskset for example.
178 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
180 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
181 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
182 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
183 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
184 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
185 includes %C when context information is available.
187 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
188 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
189 rather than a file system attribute.
191 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
192 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
193 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
194 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
196 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
197 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
198 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
200 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
201 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
202 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
205 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
209 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
210 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
212 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
214 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
215 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
217 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
218 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
219 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
220 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
222 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
223 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
224 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
228 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
229 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
231 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
232 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
233 duration after the initial signal was sent.
235 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
236 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
237 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
238 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
239 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
240 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
241 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
242 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
243 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
245 ** Changes in behavior
247 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
248 sequence when it would be a no-op.
250 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
251 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
254 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
258 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
259 of available processors, which may not have been the case
260 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
261 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
265 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
266 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
268 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
269 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
270 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
271 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
273 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
274 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
275 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
278 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
282 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
283 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
284 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
286 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
287 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
288 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
290 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
291 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
293 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
294 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
295 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
296 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
298 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
299 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
300 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
302 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
303 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
304 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
305 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
307 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
308 renamed-aside and then recreated.
309 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
311 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
312 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
313 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
314 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
316 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
317 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
318 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
320 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
321 processes will not intersperse their output.
322 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
325 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
329 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
330 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
332 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
333 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
335 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
336 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
337 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
338 the presence of the empty string argument.
339 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
341 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
342 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
343 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
344 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
346 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
347 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
349 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
350 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
351 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
353 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
354 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
355 and with a malicious user on the same system
356 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
357 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
360 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
364 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
365 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
366 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
368 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
369 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
370 offending directory and all "contents."
372 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
373 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
374 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
376 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
377 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
378 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
380 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
381 processes will not intersperse their output.
382 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
383 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
385 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
386 output the name of the file to stdout.
387 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
389 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
390 call fails with errno == EACCES.
391 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
393 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
394 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
397 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
398 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
399 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
401 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
402 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
403 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
404 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
405 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
406 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
408 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
409 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
410 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
411 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
413 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
414 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
416 ** Changes in behavior
418 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
419 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
420 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
421 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
422 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
424 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
425 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
426 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
427 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
429 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
431 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
432 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
433 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
434 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
435 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
439 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
443 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
444 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
446 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
447 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
449 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
450 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
451 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
453 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
454 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
457 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
461 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
462 when the source file doesn't have write access.
463 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
465 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
466 to accommodate leap seconds.
467 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
469 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
470 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
471 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
473 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
475 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
476 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
477 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
479 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
480 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
481 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
482 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
483 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
487 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
488 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
489 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
490 directory or a symlink to a directory.
492 ** Changes in behavior
494 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
495 environment variable is set.
497 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
498 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
499 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
503 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
504 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
505 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
506 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
508 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
509 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
510 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
511 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
515 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
516 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
517 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
519 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
520 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
521 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
522 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
523 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
524 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
527 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
528 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
531 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
535 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
536 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
537 and libraries tested at configure time.
538 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
540 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
541 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
543 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
544 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
546 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
547 printing a summary to stderr.
548 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
550 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
551 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
552 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
554 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
555 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
557 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
558 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
559 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
560 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
562 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
563 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
564 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
565 which is relatively unusual.
566 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
568 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
569 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
570 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
571 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
572 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
573 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
574 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
578 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
579 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
580 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
581 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
582 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
586 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
587 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
589 ** Changes in behavior
591 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
592 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
593 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
594 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
595 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
598 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
602 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
603 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
605 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
606 before data copying has started.
608 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
609 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
611 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
612 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
613 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
614 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
616 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
617 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
618 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
619 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
621 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
626 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
627 for its standard streams.
629 ** Changes in behavior
631 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
632 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
633 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
634 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
635 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
636 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
638 ** Deprecated options
640 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
641 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
645 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
647 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
648 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
651 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
653 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
654 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
656 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
657 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
660 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
664 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
665 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
666 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
667 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
669 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
670 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
671 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
672 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
673 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
678 make check: two tests have been corrected
682 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
683 inherited from gnulib.
686 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
690 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
691 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
692 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
693 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
695 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
696 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
698 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
700 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
701 systems without xattr support.
703 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
704 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
705 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
707 ** Changes in behavior
709 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
710 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
711 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
712 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
714 ** Improved robustness
716 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
717 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
718 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
719 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
720 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
721 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
722 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
723 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
724 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
728 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
729 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
731 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
732 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
733 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
734 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
735 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
738 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
742 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
743 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
744 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
748 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
749 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
750 data was read, or on process exit.
751 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
753 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
754 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
755 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
756 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
758 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
759 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
760 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
761 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
763 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
764 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
766 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
767 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
769 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
770 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
771 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
773 ** Changes in behavior
775 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
776 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
777 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
779 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
780 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
782 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
783 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
784 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
787 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
791 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
793 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
794 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
795 install: Never copies xattrs
797 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
798 from overwriting any existing destination file
800 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
801 mode where this feature is available.
803 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
804 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
805 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
806 do not modify the destination at all.
808 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
810 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
814 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
815 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
817 cp uses much less memory in some situations
819 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
820 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
822 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
823 processing the first file name
825 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
826 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
827 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
828 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
830 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
831 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
833 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
834 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
837 ** Changes in behavior
839 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
840 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
842 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
843 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
844 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
846 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
847 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
849 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
851 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
852 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
853 is still marked with a '+'.
856 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
860 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
861 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
865 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
866 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
867 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
868 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
869 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
870 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
872 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
873 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
875 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
876 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
878 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
880 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
881 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
882 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
884 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
885 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
887 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
888 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
889 used to factor large numbers.
891 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
894 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
896 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
898 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
899 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
901 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
902 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
903 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
904 maximum command-line (argv) length.
906 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
907 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
908 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
910 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
911 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
915 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
917 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
918 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
920 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
921 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
923 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
925 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
926 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
930 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
931 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
932 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
934 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
936 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
937 no matter how many files are in a given directory
939 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
940 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
941 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
943 ** Changes in behavior
945 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
946 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
949 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
953 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
955 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
956 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
957 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
959 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
960 with no USERNAME argument.
962 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
963 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
964 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
966 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
967 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
968 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
969 number of fields for some inputs.
971 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
972 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
974 ** Changes in behavior
976 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
977 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
980 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
984 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
986 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
987 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
988 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
989 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
991 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
992 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
994 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
995 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
997 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
998 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1000 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1001 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1002 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1003 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1005 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1006 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1007 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1008 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1009 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1010 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1012 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1013 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1015 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1016 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1017 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1019 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1020 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1022 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1023 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1025 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1026 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1027 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1028 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1030 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1031 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1033 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1034 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1036 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1037 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1038 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1042 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1043 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1045 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1046 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1047 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1048 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1052 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1053 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1055 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1057 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1061 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1062 which have negative errno values.
1066 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1070 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1074 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1075 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1078 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1082 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1083 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1084 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1086 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1087 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1088 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1089 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1093 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1094 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1095 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1096 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1099 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1103 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1105 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1106 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1107 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1110 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1114 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1115 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1117 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1119 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1121 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1123 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1127 ** Changes in behavior
1129 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1130 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1132 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1133 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1135 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1136 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1137 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1141 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1142 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1143 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1144 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1145 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1146 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1147 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1148 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1149 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1150 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1151 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1153 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1154 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1155 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1158 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1161 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1162 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1163 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1165 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1166 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1167 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1170 ** New build options
1172 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1173 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1174 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1175 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1177 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1178 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1179 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1180 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1181 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1182 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1183 of "make check" fail.
1185 ** Remove deprecated options
1187 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1188 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1189 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1190 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1191 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1193 ** Improved robustness
1195 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1196 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1197 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1198 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1199 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1200 loss of the contents of a/f.
1202 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1203 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1207 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1208 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1209 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1211 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1212 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1213 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1214 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1216 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1217 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1218 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1219 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1220 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1221 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1222 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1223 destination is a symlink.
1225 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1227 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1228 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1230 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1231 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1233 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1235 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1236 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1238 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1239 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1241 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1244 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1245 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1247 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1248 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1250 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1251 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1252 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1253 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1255 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1256 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1257 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1259 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1260 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1261 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1263 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1264 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1265 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1266 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1268 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1269 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1270 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1272 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1273 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1275 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1276 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1278 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1280 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1281 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1282 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1284 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1285 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1287 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1288 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1290 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1291 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1293 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1294 [present in the original version]
1297 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1301 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1303 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1304 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1305 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1307 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1308 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1310 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1314 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1315 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1317 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1318 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1320 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1321 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1323 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1324 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1325 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1326 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1327 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1328 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1330 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1331 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1334 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1335 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1337 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1340 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1341 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1342 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1344 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1345 directory is unreadable.
1347 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1348 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1349 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1351 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1352 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1353 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1354 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1355 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1358 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1359 Before it would print nothing.
1361 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1363 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1364 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1365 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1366 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1367 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1368 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1369 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1370 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1372 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1376 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1377 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1378 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1380 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1381 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1382 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1383 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1386 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1390 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1391 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1392 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1393 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1394 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1395 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1396 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1398 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1399 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1400 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1401 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1402 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1403 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1404 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1405 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1407 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1408 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1409 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1412 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1416 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1417 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1419 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1420 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1421 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1423 ** Improved robustness
1425 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1426 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1427 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1430 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1434 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1435 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1436 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1437 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1438 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1440 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1444 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1447 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1451 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1452 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1453 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1454 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1456 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1457 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1459 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1460 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1461 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1464 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1466 ** Improved robustness
1468 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1469 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1471 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1472 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1473 or NFS-mounted partition.
1475 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1476 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1480 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1481 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1482 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1483 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1484 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1485 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1487 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1488 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1490 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1491 or neglect to report file removal.
1493 For the "groups" command:
1495 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1496 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1498 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1500 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1502 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1506 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1507 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1510 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1512 ** Changes in behavior
1514 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1515 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1516 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1517 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1519 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1520 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1521 a final `./' or `../' component.
1523 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1524 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1525 this only for pipes.
1527 ** Infrastructure changes
1529 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1530 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1531 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1532 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1536 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1537 name is "." or "..".
1539 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1540 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1541 dirent.d_type support.
1543 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1544 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1546 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1547 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1548 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1549 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1552 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1554 ** Changes in behavior
1556 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1560 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1561 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1565 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1566 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1567 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1569 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1570 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1572 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1573 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1575 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1577 ** Improved robustness
1579 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1580 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1581 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1583 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1584 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1587 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1588 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1590 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1591 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1593 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1594 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1596 ** Changes in behavior
1598 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1599 where the two are distinct.
1601 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1602 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1603 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1604 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1605 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1606 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1607 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1608 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1609 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1610 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1611 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1612 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1613 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1614 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1615 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1616 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1617 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1619 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1620 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1621 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1623 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1624 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1625 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1626 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1629 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1630 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1634 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1635 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1636 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1637 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1639 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1640 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1641 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1643 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1644 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1645 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1646 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1647 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1650 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1651 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1653 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1654 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1655 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1656 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1658 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1659 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1660 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1662 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1663 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1664 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1665 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1667 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1668 and sticky) with the -m option.
1670 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1671 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1672 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1673 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1674 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1676 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1677 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1679 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1683 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1684 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1685 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1686 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1688 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1690 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1692 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1693 silently ignoring one of them.
1695 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1696 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1697 containing this change was 5.92.
1699 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1700 automatically newline terminated.
1702 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1703 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1704 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1705 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1708 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1709 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1710 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1713 ** Scheduled for removal
1715 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1716 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1718 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1719 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1720 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1721 command to unlink a directory.
1723 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1724 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1725 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1726 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1730 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1731 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1732 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1733 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1734 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1735 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1739 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1740 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1742 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1744 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1745 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1746 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1748 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1749 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1752 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1753 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1755 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1756 list directories before files.
1758 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1759 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1760 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1761 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1764 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1766 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1768 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1769 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1770 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1772 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1773 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1777 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1778 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1779 usually printing nothing.
1781 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1783 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1784 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1785 them with hard-linked directories.
1787 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1788 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1789 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1791 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1792 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1793 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1795 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1798 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1799 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1801 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1802 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1804 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1805 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1807 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1808 all command-line arguments.
1810 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1812 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1814 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1815 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1817 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1819 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1820 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1821 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1822 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1823 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1825 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1826 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1828 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1829 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1830 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1831 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1833 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1835 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1839 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1840 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1842 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1843 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1845 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1846 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1848 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1849 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1851 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1852 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1854 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1856 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1857 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1858 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1861 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1863 ** Build-related bug fixes
1865 installing .mo files would fail
1868 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1872 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1874 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1877 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1881 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1882 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1886 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1888 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1889 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1891 ** Deprecated options
1893 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1894 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1896 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1900 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1902 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1903 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1904 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1905 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1907 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1910 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1916 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1921 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1923 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1925 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1926 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1927 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1929 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1930 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1931 problematic usages. These include:
1933 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1934 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1935 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1936 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1937 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1938 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1939 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1940 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1941 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1943 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1944 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1946 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1947 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1948 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1949 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1951 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1952 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1953 between binary and text files.
1955 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1959 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1963 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1964 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1966 head tac tail tee tr
1967 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1969 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1970 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1972 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1973 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1974 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1976 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1978 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1980 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1981 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1982 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1986 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1988 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1989 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1991 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1992 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1993 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1997 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1998 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2002 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2003 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2004 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2008 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2009 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2013 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2015 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2017 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2021 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2022 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2023 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2025 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2026 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2027 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2028 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2029 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2031 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2035 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2036 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2037 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2039 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2041 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2042 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2043 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2044 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2046 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2048 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2049 rather than silently wrapping around.
2051 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2052 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2054 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2055 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2057 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2058 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2059 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2060 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2062 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2064 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2066 ** Improved robustness
2068 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2069 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2070 no matter how large the result.
2072 ** Improved portability
2074 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2075 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2077 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2079 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2080 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2081 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2083 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2084 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2088 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2089 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2091 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2093 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2094 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2095 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2096 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2098 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2099 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2101 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2102 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2103 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2105 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2107 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2108 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2110 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2111 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2113 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2115 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2116 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2118 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2119 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2121 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2122 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2123 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2125 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2127 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2129 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2133 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2135 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2136 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2137 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2139 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2140 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2142 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2143 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2144 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2146 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2147 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2149 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2150 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2151 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2152 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2154 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2155 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2157 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2158 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2159 the file system does not support it.
2161 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2163 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2164 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2166 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2168 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2169 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2171 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2172 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2173 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2174 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2176 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2177 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2180 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2181 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2182 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2183 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2185 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2186 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2187 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2188 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2190 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2191 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2193 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2195 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2196 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2197 reporting incorrect results.
2201 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2202 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2204 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2207 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2209 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2210 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2212 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2213 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2215 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2218 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2219 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2220 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2221 the file name does not look like a page range.
2223 printf has several changes:
2225 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2226 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2228 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2229 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2230 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2232 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2233 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2236 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2237 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2239 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2240 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2242 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2244 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2245 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2247 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2249 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2251 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2252 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2253 when first encountering the directory.
2257 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2258 output; POSIX requires this.
2260 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2261 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2263 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2265 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2266 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2268 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2269 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2271 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2272 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2273 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2274 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2275 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2276 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2277 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2279 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2280 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2281 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2283 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2284 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2286 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2288 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2290 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2291 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2292 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2293 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2295 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2299 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2300 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2301 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2302 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2303 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2305 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2306 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2307 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2309 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2310 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2312 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2313 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2315 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2316 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2317 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2318 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2319 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2321 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2322 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2324 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2325 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2327 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2329 nocreat do not create the output file
2330 excl fail if the output file already exists
2331 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2332 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2334 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2336 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2337 direct use direct I/O for data
2338 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2339 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2340 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2341 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2342 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2344 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2346 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2347 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2350 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2351 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2352 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2353 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2354 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2355 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2357 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2358 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2360 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2363 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2365 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2367 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2368 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2370 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2371 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2372 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2374 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2375 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2376 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2378 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2380 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2381 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2383 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2384 for compatibility with bash.
2386 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2388 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2389 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2390 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2391 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2393 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2394 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2396 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2397 ls supports TABSIZE.
2398 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2399 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2400 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2402 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2405 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2407 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2408 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2409 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2410 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2411 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2412 an offset, not as a file name.
2414 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2415 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2417 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2418 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2420 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2421 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2423 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2424 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2425 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2427 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2428 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2430 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2431 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2435 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2437 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2439 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2443 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2444 or more arguments between partitions.
2446 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2447 holes in the destination.
2449 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2450 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2451 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2452 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2453 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2454 terminates immediately.
2456 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2458 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2460 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2461 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2462 not the empty string.
2464 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2465 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2469 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2470 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2471 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2474 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2481 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2485 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2486 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2488 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2489 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2491 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2492 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2493 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2496 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2500 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2501 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2503 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2504 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2506 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2507 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2508 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2510 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2512 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2515 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2517 ** Configuration option
2519 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2520 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2524 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2525 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2529 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2530 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2531 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2534 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2535 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2536 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2537 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2538 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2539 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2540 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2543 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2547 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2548 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2549 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2551 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2552 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2554 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2556 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2557 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2558 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2559 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2561 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2563 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2564 not just the ones that reference directories
2566 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2567 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2569 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2570 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2571 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2573 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2574 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2575 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2576 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2577 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2578 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2580 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2585 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2586 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2588 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2590 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2592 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2594 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2595 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2597 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2598 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2600 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2602 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2606 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2608 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2610 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2611 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2612 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2613 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2614 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2616 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2617 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2619 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2620 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2622 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2623 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2625 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2626 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2627 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2631 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2632 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2633 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2634 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2635 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2636 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2637 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2638 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2639 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2640 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2641 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2642 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2643 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2644 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2646 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2648 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2649 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2651 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2653 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2655 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2656 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2658 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2660 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2661 without a trailing newline.
2663 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2664 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2666 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2669 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2673 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2675 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2677 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2678 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2679 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2680 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2682 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2684 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2685 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2686 be printed without leading spaces.
2688 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2689 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2694 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2695 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2696 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2698 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2700 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2701 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2703 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2704 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2706 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2707 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2709 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2711 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2713 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2715 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2716 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2718 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2720 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2722 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2723 byte offsets are specified.
2726 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2729 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2732 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2733 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2734 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2735 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2736 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2737 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2738 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2739 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2740 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2741 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2742 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2743 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2744 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2745 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2746 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2747 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2748 directory where M has write access.
2749 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2750 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2751 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2754 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2755 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2756 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2757 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2758 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2759 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2760 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2761 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2762 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2763 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2764 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2765 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2766 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2767 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2768 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2769 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2770 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2771 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2772 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2773 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2774 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2775 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2776 appeared one additional time.
2778 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2779 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2780 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2781 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2784 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2785 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2786 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2787 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2788 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2789 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2790 if there were more than 338.
2792 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2793 - false --help now exits nonzero
2796 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2797 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2798 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2799 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2802 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2803 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2804 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2805 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2806 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2809 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2810 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2811 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2812 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2813 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2814 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2815 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2818 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2819 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2820 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2821 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2822 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2823 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2825 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2826 under certain unusual conditions
2827 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2828 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2831 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2832 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2833 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2834 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2835 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2836 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2837 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2838 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2839 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2840 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2841 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2842 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2843 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2844 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2845 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2846 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2849 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2850 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2853 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2854 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2855 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2856 involving hard-linked directories
2857 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2858 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2859 character-special and block files
2862 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2863 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2864 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2865 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2866 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2867 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2868 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2869 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2870 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2872 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2873 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2874 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2875 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2876 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2877 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2878 specified on the command line.
2879 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2880 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2881 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2882 the first file untouched.
2883 * readlink: new program
2884 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2885 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2886 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2887 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2888 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2889 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2892 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2893 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2894 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2895 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2896 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2897 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2898 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2899 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2900 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2901 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2902 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2903 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2905 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2906 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2907 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2909 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2910 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2911 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2912 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2913 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2914 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2915 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2916 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2919 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2920 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2923 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2924 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2925 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2926 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2927 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2928 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2929 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2932 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2933 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2935 ========================================================================
2936 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2937 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2940 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2942 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2943 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2944 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2945 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2946 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2947 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2948 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2949 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2950 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2951 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2952 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2953 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2955 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2956 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2957 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2958 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2960 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2963 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2965 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2966 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2967 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2968 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2969 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2970 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2971 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2974 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2975 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2976 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2977 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2978 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2979 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2980 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2981 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2982 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2983 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2984 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2985 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2986 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2987 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2988 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2989 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2991 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2992 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2994 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2995 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2996 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2997 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2998 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2999 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3001 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3002 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3003 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3004 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3005 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3006 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3007 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3009 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3010 the source files in the following example:
3011 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3012 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3013 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3014 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3015 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3016 links between source files with --preserve=links
3017 * cp accepts new options:
3018 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3019 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3020 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3021 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3022 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3023 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3024 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3025 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3026 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3028 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3029 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3030 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3031 even though it's older than dest.
3032 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3033 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3034 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3035 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3036 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3038 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3039 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3040 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3041 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3042 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3043 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3044 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3046 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3047 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3048 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3050 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3051 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3052 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3053 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3054 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3055 This is the default.
3057 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3058 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3059 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3060 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3061 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3063 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3066 ========================================================================
3067 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3068 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3071 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3072 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3074 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3075 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3076 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3077 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3078 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3080 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3081 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3082 that specifies a non-directory
3085 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3086 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3087 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3088 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3089 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3090 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3091 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3092 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3093 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3094 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3095 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3096 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3097 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3098 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3099 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3100 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3101 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3102 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3103 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3104 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3105 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3106 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3107 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3108 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3110 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3111 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3112 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3114 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3116 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3117 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3119 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3120 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3121 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3122 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3123 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3125 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3126 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3127 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3128 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3129 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3131 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3133 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3134 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3135 * still more portability fixes
3136 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3137 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3139 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3141 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3143 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3145 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3146 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3147 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3148 there is any time remaining
3149 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3151 ========================================================================
3152 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3153 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3155 This package began as the union of the following:
3156 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3158 ========================================================================
3160 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3162 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3163 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3164 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3165 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3166 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3167 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.