1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
8 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
10 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
11 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
15 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
18 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
22 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
23 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
24 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
25 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
27 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
28 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
29 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
31 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
32 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
34 ** Changes in behavior
36 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
37 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
39 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
40 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
41 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
42 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
43 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
44 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
46 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
47 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
48 the same way as the others.
51 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
55 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
56 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
57 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
59 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
60 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
62 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
63 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
64 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
66 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
67 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
69 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
70 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
72 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
73 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
74 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
76 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
77 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
78 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
79 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
83 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
84 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
86 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
89 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
90 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
92 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
94 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
95 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
96 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
98 ** Changes in behavior
100 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
101 rather than its aliased target.
103 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
104 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
105 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
107 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
108 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
109 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
110 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
111 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
112 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
113 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
114 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
116 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
118 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
120 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
121 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
124 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
125 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
126 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
127 control like taskset for example.
129 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
131 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
132 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
133 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
134 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
135 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
136 includes %C when context information is available.
138 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
139 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
140 rather than a file system attribute.
142 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
143 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
144 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
145 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
147 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
148 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
149 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
151 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
152 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
153 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
156 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
160 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
161 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
163 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
165 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
166 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
168 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
169 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
170 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
171 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
173 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
174 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
175 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
179 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
180 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
182 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
183 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
184 duration after the initial signal was sent.
186 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
187 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
188 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
189 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
190 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
191 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
192 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
193 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
194 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
196 ** Changes in behavior
198 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
199 sequence when it would be a no-op.
201 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
202 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
205 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
209 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
210 of available processors, which may not have been the case
211 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
212 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
216 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
217 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
219 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
220 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
221 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
222 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
224 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
225 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
226 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
229 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
233 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
234 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
235 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
237 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
238 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
239 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
241 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
242 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
244 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
245 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
246 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
247 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
249 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
250 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
251 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
253 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
254 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
255 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
256 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
258 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
259 renamed-aside and then recreated.
260 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
262 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
263 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
264 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
265 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
267 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
268 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
269 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
271 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
272 processes will not intersperse their output.
273 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
276 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
280 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
281 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
283 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
284 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
286 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
287 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
288 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
289 the presence of the empty string argument.
290 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
292 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
293 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
294 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
295 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
297 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
298 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
300 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
301 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
302 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
304 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
305 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
306 and with a malicious user on the same system
307 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
308 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
311 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
315 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
316 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
317 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
319 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
320 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
321 offending directory and all "contents."
323 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
324 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
325 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
327 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
328 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
329 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
331 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
332 processes will not intersperse their output.
333 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
334 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
336 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
337 output the name of the file to stdout.
338 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
340 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
341 call fails with errno == EACCES.
342 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
344 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
345 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
348 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
349 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
350 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
352 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
353 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
354 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
355 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
356 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
357 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
359 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
360 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
361 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
362 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
364 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
365 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
367 ** Changes in behavior
369 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
370 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
371 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
372 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
373 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
375 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
376 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
377 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
378 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
380 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
382 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
383 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
384 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
385 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
386 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
390 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
394 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
395 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
397 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
398 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
400 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
401 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
402 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
404 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
405 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
408 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
412 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
413 when the source file doesn't have write access.
414 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
416 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
417 to accommodate leap seconds.
418 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
420 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
421 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
422 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
424 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
426 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
427 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
428 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
430 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
431 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
432 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
433 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
434 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
438 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
439 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
440 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
441 directory or a symlink to a directory.
443 ** Changes in behavior
445 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
446 environment variable is set.
448 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
449 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
450 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
454 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
455 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
456 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
457 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
459 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
460 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
461 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
462 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
466 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
467 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
468 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
470 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
471 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
472 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
473 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
474 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
475 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
478 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
479 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
482 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
486 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
487 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
488 and libraries tested at configure time.
489 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
491 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
492 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
494 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
495 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
497 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
498 printing a summary to stderr.
499 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
501 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
502 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
503 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
505 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
506 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
508 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
509 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
510 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
511 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
513 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
514 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
515 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
516 which is relatively unusual.
517 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
519 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
520 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
521 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
522 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
523 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
524 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
525 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
529 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
530 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
531 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
532 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
533 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
537 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
538 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
540 ** Changes in behavior
542 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
543 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
544 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
545 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
546 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
549 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
553 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
554 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
556 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
557 before data copying has started.
559 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
560 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
562 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
563 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
564 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
565 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
567 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
568 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
569 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
570 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
572 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
577 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
578 for its standard streams.
580 ** Changes in behavior
582 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
583 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
584 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
585 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
586 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
587 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
589 ** Deprecated options
591 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
592 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
596 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
598 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
599 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
602 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
604 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
605 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
607 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
608 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
611 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
615 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
616 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
617 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
618 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
620 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
621 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
622 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
623 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
624 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
629 make check: two tests have been corrected
633 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
634 inherited from gnulib.
637 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
641 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
642 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
643 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
644 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
646 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
647 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
649 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
651 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
652 systems without xattr support.
654 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
655 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
656 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
658 ** Changes in behavior
660 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
661 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
662 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
663 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
665 ** Improved robustness
667 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
668 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
669 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
670 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
671 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
672 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
673 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
674 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
675 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
679 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
680 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
682 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
683 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
684 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
685 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
686 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
689 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
693 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
694 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
695 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
699 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
700 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
701 data was read, or on process exit.
702 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
704 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
705 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
706 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
707 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
709 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
710 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
711 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
712 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
714 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
715 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
717 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
718 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
720 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
721 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
722 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
724 ** Changes in behavior
726 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
727 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
728 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
730 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
731 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
733 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
734 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
735 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
738 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
742 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
744 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
745 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
746 install: Never copies xattrs
748 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
749 from overwriting any existing destination file
751 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
752 mode where this feature is available.
754 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
755 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
756 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
757 do not modify the destination at all.
759 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
761 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
765 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
766 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
768 cp uses much less memory in some situations
770 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
771 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
773 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
774 processing the first file name
776 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
777 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
778 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
779 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
781 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
782 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
784 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
785 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
788 ** Changes in behavior
790 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
791 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
793 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
794 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
795 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
797 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
798 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
800 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
802 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
803 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
804 is still marked with a '+'.
807 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
811 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
812 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
816 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
817 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
818 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
819 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
820 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
821 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
823 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
824 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
826 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
827 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
829 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
831 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
832 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
833 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
835 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
836 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
838 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
839 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
840 used to factor large numbers.
842 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
845 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
847 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
849 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
850 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
852 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
853 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
854 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
855 maximum command-line (argv) length.
857 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
858 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
859 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
861 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
862 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
866 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
868 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
869 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
871 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
872 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
874 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
876 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
877 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
881 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
882 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
883 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
885 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
887 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
888 no matter how many files are in a given directory
890 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
891 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
892 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
894 ** Changes in behavior
896 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
897 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
900 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
904 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
906 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
907 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
908 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
910 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
911 with no USERNAME argument.
913 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
914 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
915 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
917 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
918 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
919 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
920 number of fields for some inputs.
922 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
923 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
925 ** Changes in behavior
927 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
928 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
931 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
935 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
937 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
938 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
939 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
940 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
942 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
943 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
945 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
946 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
948 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
949 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
951 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
952 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
953 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
954 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
956 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
957 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
958 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
959 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
960 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
961 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
963 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
964 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
966 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
967 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
968 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
970 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
971 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
973 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
974 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
976 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
977 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
978 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
979 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
981 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
982 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
984 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
985 in more cases when a directory is empty.
987 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
988 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
989 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
993 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
994 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
996 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
997 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
998 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
999 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1003 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1004 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1006 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1008 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1012 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1013 which have negative errno values.
1017 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1021 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1025 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1026 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1029 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1033 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1034 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1035 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1037 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1038 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1039 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1040 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1044 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1045 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1046 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1047 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1050 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1054 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1056 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1057 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1058 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1061 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1065 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1066 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1068 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1070 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1072 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1074 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1078 ** Changes in behavior
1080 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1081 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1083 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1084 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1086 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1087 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1088 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1092 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1093 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1094 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1095 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1096 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1097 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1098 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1099 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1100 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1101 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1102 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1104 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1105 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1106 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1109 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1112 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1113 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1114 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1116 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1117 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1118 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1121 ** New build options
1123 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1124 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1125 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1126 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1128 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1129 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1130 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1131 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1132 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1133 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1134 of "make check" fail.
1136 ** Remove deprecated options
1138 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1139 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1140 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1141 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1142 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1144 ** Improved robustness
1146 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1147 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1148 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1149 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1150 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1151 loss of the contents of a/f.
1153 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1154 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1158 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1159 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1160 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1162 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1163 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1164 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1165 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1167 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1168 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1169 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1170 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1171 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1172 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1173 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1174 destination is a symlink.
1176 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1178 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1179 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1181 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1182 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1184 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1186 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1187 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1189 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1190 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1192 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1195 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1196 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1198 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1199 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1201 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1202 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1203 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1204 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1206 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1207 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1208 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1210 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1211 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1212 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1214 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1215 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1216 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1217 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1219 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1220 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1221 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1223 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1224 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1226 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1227 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1229 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1231 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1232 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1233 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1235 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1236 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1238 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1239 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1241 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1242 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1244 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1245 [present in the original version]
1248 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1252 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1254 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1255 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1256 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1258 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1259 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1261 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1265 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1266 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1268 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1269 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1271 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1272 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1274 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1275 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1276 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1277 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1278 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1279 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1281 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1282 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1285 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1286 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1288 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1291 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1292 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1293 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1295 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1296 directory is unreadable.
1298 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1299 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1300 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1302 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1303 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1304 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1305 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1306 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1309 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1310 Before it would print nothing.
1312 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1314 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1315 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1316 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1317 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1318 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1319 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1320 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1321 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1323 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1327 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1328 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1329 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1331 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1332 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1333 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1334 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1337 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1341 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1342 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1343 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1344 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1345 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1346 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1347 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1349 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1350 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1351 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1352 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1353 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1354 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1355 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1356 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1358 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1359 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1360 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1363 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1367 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1368 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1370 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1371 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1372 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1374 ** Improved robustness
1376 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1377 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1378 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1381 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1385 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1386 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1387 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1388 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1389 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1391 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1395 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1398 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1402 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1403 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1404 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1405 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1407 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1408 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1410 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1411 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1412 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1415 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1417 ** Improved robustness
1419 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1420 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1422 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1423 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1424 or NFS-mounted partition.
1426 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1427 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1431 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1432 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1433 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1434 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1435 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1436 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1438 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1439 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1441 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1442 or neglect to report file removal.
1444 For the "groups" command:
1446 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1447 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1449 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1451 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1453 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1457 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1458 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1461 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1463 ** Changes in behavior
1465 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1466 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1467 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1468 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1470 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1471 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1472 a final `./' or `../' component.
1474 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1475 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1476 this only for pipes.
1478 ** Infrastructure changes
1480 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1481 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1482 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1483 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1487 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1488 name is "." or "..".
1490 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1491 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1492 dirent.d_type support.
1494 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1495 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1497 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1498 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1499 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1500 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1503 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1505 ** Changes in behavior
1507 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1511 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1512 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1516 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1517 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1518 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1520 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1521 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1523 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1524 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1526 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1528 ** Improved robustness
1530 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1531 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1532 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1534 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1535 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1538 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1539 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1541 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1542 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1544 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1545 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1547 ** Changes in behavior
1549 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1550 where the two are distinct.
1552 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1553 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1554 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1555 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1556 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1557 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1558 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1559 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1560 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1561 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1562 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1563 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1564 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1565 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1566 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1567 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1568 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1570 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1571 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1572 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1574 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1575 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1576 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1577 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1580 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1581 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1585 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1586 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1587 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1588 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1590 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1591 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1592 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1594 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1595 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1596 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1597 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1598 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1601 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1602 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1604 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1605 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1606 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1607 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1609 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1610 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1611 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1613 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1614 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1615 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1616 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1618 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1619 and sticky) with the -m option.
1621 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1622 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1623 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1624 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1625 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1627 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1628 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1630 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1634 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1635 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1636 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1637 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1639 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1641 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1643 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1644 silently ignoring one of them.
1646 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1647 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1648 containing this change was 5.92.
1650 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1651 automatically newline terminated.
1653 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1654 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1655 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1656 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1659 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1660 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1661 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1664 ** Scheduled for removal
1666 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1667 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1669 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1670 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1671 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1672 command to unlink a directory.
1674 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1675 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1676 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1677 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1681 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1682 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1683 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1684 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1685 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1686 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1690 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1691 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1693 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1695 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1696 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1697 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1699 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1700 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1703 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1704 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1706 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1707 list directories before files.
1709 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1710 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1711 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1712 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1715 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1717 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1719 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1720 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1721 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1723 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1724 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1728 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1729 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1730 usually printing nothing.
1732 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1734 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1735 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1736 them with hard-linked directories.
1738 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1739 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1740 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1742 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1743 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1744 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1746 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1749 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1750 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1752 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1753 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1755 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1756 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1758 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1759 all command-line arguments.
1761 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1763 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1765 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1766 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1768 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1770 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1771 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1772 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1773 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1774 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1776 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1777 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1779 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1780 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1781 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1782 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1784 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1786 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1790 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1791 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1793 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1794 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1796 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1797 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1799 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1800 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1802 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1803 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1805 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1807 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1808 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1809 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1812 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1814 ** Build-related bug fixes
1816 installing .mo files would fail
1819 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1823 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1825 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1828 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1832 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1833 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1837 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1839 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1840 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1842 ** Deprecated options
1844 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1845 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1847 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1851 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1853 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1854 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1855 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1856 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1858 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1861 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1867 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1872 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1874 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1876 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1877 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1878 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1880 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1881 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1882 problematic usages. These include:
1884 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1885 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1886 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1887 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1888 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1889 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1890 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1891 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1892 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1894 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1895 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1897 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1898 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1899 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1900 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1902 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1903 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1904 between binary and text files.
1906 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1910 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1914 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1915 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1917 head tac tail tee tr
1918 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1920 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1921 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1923 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1924 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1925 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1927 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1929 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1931 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1932 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1933 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1937 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1939 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1940 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1942 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1943 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1944 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1948 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1949 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1953 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1954 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1955 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1959 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1960 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1964 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1966 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1968 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1972 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1973 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1974 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1976 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1977 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1978 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1979 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1980 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1982 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
1986 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
1987 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
1988 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
1990 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
1992 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
1993 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
1994 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
1995 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
1997 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
1999 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2000 rather than silently wrapping around.
2002 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2003 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2005 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2006 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2008 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2009 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2010 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2011 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2013 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2015 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2017 ** Improved robustness
2019 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2020 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2021 no matter how large the result.
2023 ** Improved portability
2025 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2026 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2028 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2030 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2031 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2032 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2034 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2035 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2039 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2040 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2042 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2044 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2045 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2046 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2047 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2049 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2050 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2052 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2053 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2054 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2056 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2058 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2059 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2061 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2062 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2064 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2066 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2067 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2069 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2070 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2072 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2073 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2074 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2076 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2078 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2080 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2084 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2086 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2087 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2088 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2090 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2091 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2093 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2094 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2095 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2097 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2098 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2100 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2101 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2102 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2103 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2105 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2106 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2108 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2109 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2110 the file system does not support it.
2112 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2114 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2115 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2117 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2119 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2120 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2122 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2123 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2124 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2125 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2127 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2128 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2131 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2132 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2133 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2134 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2136 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2137 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2138 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2139 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2141 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2142 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2144 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2146 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2147 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2148 reporting incorrect results.
2152 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2153 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2155 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2158 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2160 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2161 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2163 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2164 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2166 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2169 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2170 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2171 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2172 the file name does not look like a page range.
2174 printf has several changes:
2176 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2177 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2179 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2180 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2181 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2183 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2184 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2187 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2188 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2190 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2191 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2193 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2195 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2196 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2198 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2200 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2202 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2203 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2204 when first encountering the directory.
2208 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2209 output; POSIX requires this.
2211 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2212 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2214 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2216 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2217 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2219 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2220 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2222 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2223 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2224 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2225 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2226 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2227 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2228 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2230 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2231 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2232 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2234 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2235 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2237 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2239 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2241 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2242 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2243 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2244 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2246 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2250 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2251 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2252 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2253 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2254 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2256 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2257 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2258 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2260 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2261 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2263 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2264 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2266 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2267 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2268 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2269 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2270 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2272 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2273 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2275 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2276 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2278 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2280 nocreat do not create the output file
2281 excl fail if the output file already exists
2282 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2283 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2285 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2287 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2288 direct use direct I/O for data
2289 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2290 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2291 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2292 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2293 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2295 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2297 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2298 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2301 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2302 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2303 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2304 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2305 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2306 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2308 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2309 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2311 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2314 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2316 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2318 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2319 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2321 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2322 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2323 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2325 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2326 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2327 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2329 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2331 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2332 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2334 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2335 for compatibility with bash.
2337 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2339 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2340 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2341 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2342 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2344 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2345 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2347 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2348 ls supports TABSIZE.
2349 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2350 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2351 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2353 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2356 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2358 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2359 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2360 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2361 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2362 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2363 an offset, not as a file name.
2365 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2366 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2368 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2369 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2371 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2372 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2374 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2375 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2376 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2378 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2379 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2381 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2382 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2386 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2388 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2390 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2394 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2395 or more arguments between partitions.
2397 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2398 holes in the destination.
2400 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2401 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2402 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2403 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2404 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2405 terminates immediately.
2407 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2409 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2411 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2412 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2413 not the empty string.
2415 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2416 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2420 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2421 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2422 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2425 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2432 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2436 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2437 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2439 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2440 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2442 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2443 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2444 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2447 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2451 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2452 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2454 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2455 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2457 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2458 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2459 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2461 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2463 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2466 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2468 ** Configuration option
2470 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2471 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2475 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2476 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2480 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2481 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2482 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2485 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2486 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2487 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2488 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2489 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2490 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2491 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2494 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2498 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2499 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2500 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2502 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2503 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2505 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2507 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2508 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2509 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2510 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2512 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2514 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2515 not just the ones that reference directories
2517 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2518 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2520 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2521 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2522 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2524 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2525 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2526 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2527 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2528 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2529 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2531 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2536 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2537 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2539 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2541 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2543 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2545 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2546 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2548 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2549 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2551 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2553 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2557 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2559 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2561 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2562 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2563 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2564 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2565 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2567 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2568 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2570 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2571 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2573 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2574 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2576 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2577 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2578 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2582 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2583 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2584 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2585 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2586 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2587 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2588 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2589 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2590 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2591 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2592 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2593 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2594 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2595 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2597 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2599 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2600 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2602 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2604 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2606 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2607 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2609 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2611 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2612 without a trailing newline.
2614 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2615 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2617 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2620 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2624 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2626 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2628 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2629 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2630 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2631 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2633 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2635 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2636 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2637 be printed without leading spaces.
2639 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2640 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2645 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2646 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2647 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2649 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2651 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2652 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2654 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2655 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2657 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2658 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2660 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2662 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2664 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2666 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2667 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2669 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2671 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2673 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2674 byte offsets are specified.
2677 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2680 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2683 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2684 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2685 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2686 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2687 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2688 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2689 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2690 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2691 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2692 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2693 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2694 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2695 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2696 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2697 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2698 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2699 directory where M has write access.
2700 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2701 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2702 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2705 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2706 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2707 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2708 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2709 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2710 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2711 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2712 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2713 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2714 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2715 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2716 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2717 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2718 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2719 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2720 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2721 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2722 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2723 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2724 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2725 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2726 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2727 appeared one additional time.
2729 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2730 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2731 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2732 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2735 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2736 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2737 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2738 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2739 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2740 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2741 if there were more than 338.
2743 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2744 - false --help now exits nonzero
2747 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2748 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2749 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2750 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2753 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2754 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2755 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2756 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2757 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2760 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2761 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2762 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2763 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2764 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2765 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2766 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2769 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2770 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2771 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2772 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2773 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2774 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2776 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2777 under certain unusual conditions
2778 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2779 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2782 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2783 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2784 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2785 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2786 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2787 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2788 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2789 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2790 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2791 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2792 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2793 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2794 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2795 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2796 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2797 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2800 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2801 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2804 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2805 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2806 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2807 involving hard-linked directories
2808 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2809 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2810 character-special and block files
2813 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2814 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2815 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2816 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2817 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2818 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2819 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2820 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2821 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2823 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2824 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2825 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2826 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2827 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2828 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2829 specified on the command line.
2830 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2831 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2832 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2833 the first file untouched.
2834 * readlink: new program
2835 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2836 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2837 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2838 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2839 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2840 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2843 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2844 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2845 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2846 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2847 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2848 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2849 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2850 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2851 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2852 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2853 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2854 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2856 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2857 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2858 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2860 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2861 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2862 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2863 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2864 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2865 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2866 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2867 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2870 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2871 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2874 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2875 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2876 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2877 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2878 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2879 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2880 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2883 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2884 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2886 ========================================================================
2887 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2888 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2891 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2893 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2894 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2895 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2896 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2897 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2898 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2899 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2900 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2901 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2902 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2903 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2904 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2906 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2907 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2908 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2909 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2911 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2914 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2916 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2917 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2918 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2919 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2920 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2921 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2922 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2925 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2926 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2927 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2928 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2929 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2930 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2931 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2932 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2933 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2934 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2935 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2936 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2937 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2938 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2939 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2940 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2942 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2943 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2945 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2946 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2947 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2948 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2949 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2950 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2952 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2953 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2954 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2955 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2956 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2957 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2958 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2960 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2961 the source files in the following example:
2962 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2963 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2964 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2965 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2966 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2967 links between source files with --preserve=links
2968 * cp accepts new options:
2969 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2970 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2971 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2972 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2973 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2974 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2975 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2976 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2977 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2979 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2980 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2981 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2982 even though it's older than dest.
2983 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
2984 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
2985 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
2986 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
2987 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
2989 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
2990 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
2991 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
2992 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
2993 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
2994 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
2995 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
2997 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
2998 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
2999 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3001 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3002 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3003 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3004 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3005 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3006 This is the default.
3008 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3009 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3010 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3011 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3012 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3014 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3017 ========================================================================
3018 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3019 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3022 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3023 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3025 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3026 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3027 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3028 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3029 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3031 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3032 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3033 that specifies a non-directory
3036 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3037 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3038 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3039 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3040 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3041 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3042 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3043 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3044 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3045 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3046 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3047 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3048 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3049 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3050 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3051 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3052 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3053 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3054 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3055 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3056 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3057 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3058 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3059 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3061 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3062 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3063 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3065 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3067 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3068 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3070 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3071 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3072 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3073 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3074 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3076 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3077 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3078 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3079 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3080 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3082 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3084 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3085 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3086 * still more portability fixes
3087 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3088 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3090 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3092 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3094 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3096 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3097 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3098 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3099 there is any time remaining
3100 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3102 ========================================================================
3103 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3104 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3106 This package began as the union of the following:
3107 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3109 ========================================================================
3111 Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3113 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3114 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3115 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3116 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3117 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3118 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.