1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
8 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
9 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
11 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
12 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
14 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
15 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
17 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
18 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
19 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
20 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
24 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
25 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
27 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
30 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
31 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
33 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
35 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output
36 the mount point for a file.
38 ** Changes in behavior
40 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
41 rather than its aliased target.
43 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
44 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
45 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
47 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
48 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
49 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
50 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
51 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
52 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
53 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
54 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
56 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
58 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
60 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
61 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
64 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
65 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
66 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
67 control like taskset for example.
69 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
70 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
71 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning.
73 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
74 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
75 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
77 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
78 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
79 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
82 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
86 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
87 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
89 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
91 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
92 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
94 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
95 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
96 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
97 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
99 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
100 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
101 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
105 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
106 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
108 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
109 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
110 duration after the initial signal was sent.
112 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
113 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
114 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
115 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
116 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
117 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
118 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
119 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
120 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
122 ** Changes in behavior
124 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
125 sequence when it would be a no-op.
127 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
128 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
131 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
135 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
136 of available processors, which may not have been the case
137 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
138 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
142 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
143 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
145 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
146 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
147 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
148 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
150 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
151 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
152 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
155 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
159 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
160 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
161 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
163 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
164 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
165 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
167 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
168 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
170 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
171 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
172 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
173 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
175 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
176 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
177 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
179 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
180 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
181 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
182 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
184 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
185 renamed-aside and then recreated.
186 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
188 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
189 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
190 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
191 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
193 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
194 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
195 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
197 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
198 processes will not intersperse their output.
199 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
202 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
206 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
207 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
209 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
210 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
212 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
213 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
214 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
215 the presence of the empty string argument.
216 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
218 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
219 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
220 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
221 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
223 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
224 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
226 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
227 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
228 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
230 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
231 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
232 and with a malicious user on the same system
233 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
234 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
237 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
241 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
242 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
243 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
245 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
246 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
247 offending directory and all "contents."
249 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
250 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
251 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
253 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
254 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
255 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
257 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
258 processes will not intersperse their output.
259 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
260 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
262 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
263 output the name of the file to stdout.
264 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
266 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
267 call fails with errno == EACCES.
268 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
270 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
271 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
274 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
275 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
276 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
278 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
279 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
280 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
281 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
282 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
283 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
285 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
286 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
287 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
288 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
290 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
291 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
293 ** Changes in behavior
295 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
296 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
297 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
298 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
299 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
301 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
302 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
303 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
304 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
306 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
308 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
309 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
310 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
311 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
312 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
316 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
320 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
321 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
323 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
324 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
326 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
327 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
328 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
330 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
331 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
334 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
338 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
339 when the source file doesn't have write access.
340 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
342 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
343 to accommodate leap seconds.
344 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
346 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
347 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
348 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
350 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
352 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
353 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
354 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
356 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
357 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
358 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
359 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
360 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
364 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
365 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
366 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
367 directory or a symlink to a directory.
369 ** Changes in behavior
371 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
372 environment variable is set.
374 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
375 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
376 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
380 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
381 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
382 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
383 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
385 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
386 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
387 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
388 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
392 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
393 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
394 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
396 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
397 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
398 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
399 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
400 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
401 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
404 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
405 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
408 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
412 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
413 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
414 and libraries tested at configure time.
415 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
417 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
418 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
420 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
421 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
423 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
424 printing a summary to stderr.
425 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
427 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
428 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
429 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
431 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
432 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
434 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
435 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
436 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
437 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
439 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
440 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
441 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
442 which is relatively unusual.
443 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
445 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
446 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
447 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
448 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
449 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
450 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
451 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
455 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
456 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
457 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
458 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
459 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
463 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
464 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
466 ** Changes in behavior
468 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
469 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
470 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
471 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
472 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
475 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
479 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
480 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
482 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
483 before data copying has started.
485 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
486 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
488 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
489 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
490 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
491 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
493 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
494 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
495 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
496 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
498 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
503 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
504 for its standard streams.
506 ** Changes in behavior
508 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
509 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
510 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
511 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
512 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
513 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
515 ** Deprecated options
517 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
518 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
522 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
524 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
525 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
528 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
530 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
531 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
533 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
534 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
537 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
541 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
542 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
543 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
544 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
546 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
547 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
548 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
549 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
550 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
555 make check: two tests have been corrected
559 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
560 inherited from gnulib.
563 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
567 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
568 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
569 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
570 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
572 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
573 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
575 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
577 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
578 systems without xattr support.
580 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
581 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
582 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
584 ** Changes in behavior
586 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
587 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
588 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
589 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
591 ** Improved robustness
593 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
594 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
595 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
596 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
597 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
598 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
599 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
600 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
601 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
605 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
606 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
608 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
609 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
610 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
611 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
612 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
615 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
619 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
620 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
621 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
625 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
626 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
627 data was read, or on process exit.
628 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
630 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
631 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
632 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
633 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
635 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
636 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
637 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
638 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
640 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
641 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
643 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
644 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
646 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
647 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
648 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
650 ** Changes in behavior
652 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
653 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
654 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
656 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
657 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
659 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
660 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
661 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
664 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
668 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
670 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
671 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
672 install: Never copies xattrs
674 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
675 from overwriting any existing destination file
677 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
678 mode where this feature is available.
680 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
681 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
682 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
683 do not modify the destination at all.
685 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
687 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
691 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
692 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
694 cp uses much less memory in some situations
696 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
697 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
699 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
700 processing the first file name
702 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
703 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
704 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
705 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
707 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
708 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
710 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
711 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
714 ** Changes in behavior
716 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
717 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
719 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
720 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
721 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
723 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
724 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
726 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
728 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
729 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
730 is still marked with a '+'.
733 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
737 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
738 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
742 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
743 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
744 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
745 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
746 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
747 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
749 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
750 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
752 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
753 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
755 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
757 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
758 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
759 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
761 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
762 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
764 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
765 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
766 used to factor large numbers.
768 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
771 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
773 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
775 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
776 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
778 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
779 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
780 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
781 maximum command-line (argv) length.
783 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
784 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
785 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
787 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
788 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
792 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
794 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
795 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
797 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
798 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
800 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
802 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
803 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
807 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
808 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
809 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
811 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
813 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
814 no matter how many files are in a given directory
816 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
817 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
818 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
820 ** Changes in behavior
822 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
823 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
826 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
830 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
832 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
833 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
834 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
836 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
837 with no USERNAME argument.
839 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
840 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
841 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
843 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
844 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
845 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
846 number of fields for some inputs.
848 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
849 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
851 ** Changes in behavior
853 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
854 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
857 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
861 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
863 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
864 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
865 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
866 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
868 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
869 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
871 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
872 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
874 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
875 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
877 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
878 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
879 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
880 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
882 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
883 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
884 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
885 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
886 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
887 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
889 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
890 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
892 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
893 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
894 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
896 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
897 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
899 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
900 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
902 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
903 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
904 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
905 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
907 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
908 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
910 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
911 in more cases when a directory is empty.
913 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
914 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
915 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
919 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
920 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
922 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
923 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
924 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
925 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
929 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
930 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
932 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
934 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
938 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
939 which have negative errno values.
943 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
947 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
951 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
952 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
955 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
959 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
960 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
961 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
963 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
964 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
965 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
966 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
970 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
971 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
972 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
973 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
976 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
980 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
982 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
983 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
984 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
987 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
991 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
992 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
994 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
996 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
998 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1000 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1004 ** Changes in behavior
1006 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1007 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1009 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1010 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1012 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1013 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1014 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1018 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1019 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1020 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1021 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1022 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1023 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1024 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1025 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1026 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1027 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1028 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1030 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1031 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1032 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1035 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1038 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1039 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1040 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1042 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1043 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1044 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1047 ** New build options
1049 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1050 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1051 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1052 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1054 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1055 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1056 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1057 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1058 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1059 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1060 of "make check" fail.
1062 ** Remove deprecated options
1064 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1065 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1066 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1067 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1068 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1070 ** Improved robustness
1072 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1073 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1074 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1075 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1076 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1077 loss of the contents of a/f.
1079 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1080 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1084 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1085 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1086 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1088 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1089 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1090 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1091 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1093 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1094 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1095 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1096 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1097 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1098 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1099 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1100 destination is a symlink.
1102 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1104 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1105 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1107 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1108 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1110 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1112 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1113 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1115 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1116 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1118 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1121 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1122 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1124 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1125 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1127 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1128 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1129 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1130 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1132 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1133 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1134 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1136 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1137 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1138 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1140 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1141 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1142 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1143 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1145 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1146 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1147 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1149 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1150 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1152 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1153 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1155 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1157 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1158 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1159 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1161 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1162 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1164 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1165 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1167 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1168 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1170 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1171 [present in the original version]
1174 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1178 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1180 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1181 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1182 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1184 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1185 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1187 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1191 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1192 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1194 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1195 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1197 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1198 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1200 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1201 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1202 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1203 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1204 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1205 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1207 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1208 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1211 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1212 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1214 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1217 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1218 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1219 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1221 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1222 directory is unreadable.
1224 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1225 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1226 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1228 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1229 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1230 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1231 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1232 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1235 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1236 Before it would print nothing.
1238 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1240 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1241 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1242 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1243 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1244 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1245 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1246 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1247 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1249 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1253 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1254 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1255 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1257 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1258 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1259 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1260 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1263 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1267 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1268 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1269 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1270 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1271 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1272 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1273 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1275 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1276 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1277 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1278 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1279 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1280 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1281 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1282 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1284 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1285 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1286 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1289 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1293 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1294 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1296 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1297 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1298 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1300 ** Improved robustness
1302 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1303 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1304 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1307 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1311 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1312 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1313 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1314 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1315 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1317 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1321 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1324 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1328 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1329 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1330 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1331 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1333 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1334 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1336 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1337 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1338 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1341 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1343 ** Improved robustness
1345 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1346 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1348 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1349 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1350 or NFS-mounted partition.
1352 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1353 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1357 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1358 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1359 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1360 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1361 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1362 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1364 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1365 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1367 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1368 or neglect to report file removal.
1370 For the "groups" command:
1372 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1373 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1375 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1377 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1379 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1383 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1384 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1387 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1389 ** Changes in behavior
1391 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1392 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1393 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1394 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1396 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1397 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1398 a final `./' or `../' component.
1400 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1401 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1402 this only for pipes.
1404 ** Infrastructure changes
1406 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1407 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1408 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1409 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1413 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1414 name is "." or "..".
1416 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1417 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1418 dirent.d_type support.
1420 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1421 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1423 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1424 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1425 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1426 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1429 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1431 ** Changes in behavior
1433 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1437 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1438 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1442 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1443 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1444 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1446 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1447 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1449 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1450 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1452 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1454 ** Improved robustness
1456 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1457 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1458 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1460 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1461 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1464 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1465 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1467 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1468 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1470 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1471 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1473 ** Changes in behavior
1475 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1476 where the two are distinct.
1478 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1479 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1480 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1481 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1482 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1483 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1484 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1485 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1486 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1487 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1488 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1489 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1490 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1491 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1492 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1493 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1494 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1496 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1497 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1498 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1500 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1501 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1502 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1503 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1506 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1507 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1511 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1512 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1513 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1514 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1516 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1517 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1518 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1520 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1521 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1522 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1523 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1524 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1527 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1528 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1530 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1531 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1532 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1533 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1535 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1536 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1537 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1539 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1540 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1541 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1542 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1544 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1545 and sticky) with the -m option.
1547 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1548 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1549 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1550 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1551 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1553 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1554 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1556 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1560 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1561 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1562 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1563 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1565 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1567 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1569 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1570 silently ignoring one of them.
1572 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1573 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1574 containing this change was 5.92.
1576 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1577 automatically newline terminated.
1579 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1580 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1581 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1582 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1585 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1586 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1587 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1590 ** Scheduled for removal
1592 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1593 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1595 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1596 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1597 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1598 command to unlink a directory.
1600 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1601 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1602 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1603 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1607 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1608 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1609 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1610 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1611 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1612 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1616 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1617 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1619 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1621 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1622 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1623 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1625 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1626 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1629 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1630 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1632 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1633 list directories before files.
1635 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1636 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1637 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1638 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1641 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1643 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1645 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1646 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1647 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1649 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1650 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1654 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1655 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1656 usually printing nothing.
1658 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1660 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1661 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1662 them with hard-linked directories.
1664 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1665 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1666 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1668 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1669 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1670 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1672 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1675 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1676 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1678 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1679 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1681 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1682 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1684 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1685 all command-line arguments.
1687 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1689 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1691 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1692 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1694 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1696 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1697 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1698 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1699 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1700 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1702 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1703 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1705 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1706 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1707 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1708 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1710 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1712 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1716 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1717 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1719 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1720 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1722 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1723 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1725 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1726 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1728 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1729 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1731 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1733 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1734 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1735 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1738 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1740 ** Build-related bug fixes
1742 installing .mo files would fail
1745 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1749 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1751 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1754 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1758 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1759 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1763 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1765 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1766 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1768 ** Deprecated options
1770 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1771 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1773 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1777 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1779 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1780 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1781 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1782 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1784 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1787 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1793 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1798 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1800 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1802 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1803 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1804 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1806 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1807 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1808 problematic usages. These include:
1810 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1811 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1812 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1813 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1814 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1815 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1816 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1817 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1818 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1820 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1821 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1823 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1824 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1825 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1826 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1828 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1829 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1830 between binary and text files.
1832 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1836 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1840 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1841 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1843 head tac tail tee tr
1844 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1846 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1847 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1849 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1850 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1851 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1853 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1855 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1857 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1858 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1859 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1863 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1865 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1866 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1868 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1869 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1870 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1874 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1875 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1879 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1880 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1881 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1885 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1886 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1890 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1892 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1894 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1898 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1899 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1900 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1902 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1903 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1904 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1905 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1906 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1908 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
1912 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
1913 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
1914 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
1916 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
1918 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
1919 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
1920 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
1921 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
1923 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
1925 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
1926 rather than silently wrapping around.
1928 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
1929 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
1931 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
1932 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
1934 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
1935 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
1936 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
1937 file /tmp/a/b/file".
1939 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
1941 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
1943 ** Improved robustness
1945 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
1946 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
1947 no matter how large the result.
1949 ** Improved portability
1951 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
1952 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
1954 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
1956 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
1957 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
1958 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
1960 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
1961 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
1965 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
1966 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
1968 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
1970 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
1971 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
1972 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
1973 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
1975 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
1976 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
1978 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
1979 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
1980 categories if not specified by dircolors.
1982 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
1984 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
1985 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
1987 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
1988 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
1990 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
1992 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
1993 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
1995 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
1996 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
1998 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
1999 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2000 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2002 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2004 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2006 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2010 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2012 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2013 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2014 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2016 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2017 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2019 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2020 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2021 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2023 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2024 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2026 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2027 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2028 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2029 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2031 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2032 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2034 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2035 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2036 the file system does not support it.
2038 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2040 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2041 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2043 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2045 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2046 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2048 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2049 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2050 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2051 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2053 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2054 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2057 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2058 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2059 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2060 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2062 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2063 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2064 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2065 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2067 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2068 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2070 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2072 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2073 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2074 reporting incorrect results.
2078 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2079 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2081 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2084 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2086 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2087 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2089 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2090 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2092 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2095 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2096 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2097 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2098 the file name does not look like a page range.
2100 printf has several changes:
2102 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2103 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2105 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2106 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2107 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2109 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2110 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2113 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2114 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2116 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2117 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2119 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2121 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2122 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2124 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2126 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2128 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2129 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2130 when first encountering the directory.
2134 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2135 output; POSIX requires this.
2137 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2138 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2140 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2142 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2143 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2145 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2146 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2148 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2149 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2150 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2151 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2152 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2153 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2154 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2156 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2157 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2158 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2160 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2161 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2163 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2165 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2167 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2168 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2169 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2170 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2172 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2176 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2177 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2178 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2179 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2180 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2182 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2183 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2184 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2186 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2187 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2189 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2190 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2192 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2193 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2194 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2195 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2196 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2198 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2199 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2201 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2202 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2204 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2206 nocreat do not create the output file
2207 excl fail if the output file already exists
2208 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2209 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2211 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2213 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2214 direct use direct I/O for data
2215 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2216 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2217 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2218 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2219 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2221 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2223 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2224 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2227 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2228 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2229 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2230 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2231 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2232 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2234 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2235 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2237 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2240 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2242 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2244 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2245 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2247 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2248 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2249 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2251 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2252 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2253 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2255 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2257 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2258 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2260 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2261 for compatibility with bash.
2263 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2265 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2266 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2267 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2268 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2270 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2271 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2273 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2274 ls supports TABSIZE.
2275 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2276 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2277 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2279 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2282 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2284 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2285 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2286 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2287 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2288 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2289 an offset, not as a file name.
2291 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2292 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2294 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2295 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2297 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2298 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2300 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2301 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2302 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2304 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2305 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2307 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2308 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2312 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2314 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2316 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2320 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2321 or more arguments between partitions.
2323 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2324 holes in the destination.
2326 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2327 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2328 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2329 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2330 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2331 terminates immediately.
2333 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2335 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2337 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2338 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2339 not the empty string.
2341 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2342 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2346 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2347 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2348 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2351 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2358 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2362 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2363 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2365 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2366 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2368 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2369 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2370 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2373 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2377 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2378 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2380 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2381 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2383 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2384 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2385 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2387 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2389 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2392 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2394 ** Configuration option
2396 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2397 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2401 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2402 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2406 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2407 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2408 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2411 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2412 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2413 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2414 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2415 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2416 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2417 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2420 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2424 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2425 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2426 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2428 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2429 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2431 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2433 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2434 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2435 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2436 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2438 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2440 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2441 not just the ones that reference directories
2443 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2444 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2446 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2447 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2448 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2450 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2451 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2452 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2453 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2454 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2455 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2457 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2462 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2463 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2465 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2467 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2469 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2471 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2472 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2474 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2475 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2477 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2479 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2483 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2485 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2487 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2488 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2489 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2490 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2491 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2493 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2494 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2496 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2497 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2499 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2500 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2502 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2503 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2504 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2508 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2509 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2510 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2511 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2512 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2513 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2514 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2515 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2516 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2517 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2518 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2519 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2520 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2521 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2523 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2525 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2526 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2528 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2530 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2532 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2533 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2535 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2537 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2538 without a trailing newline.
2540 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2541 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2543 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2546 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2550 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2552 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2554 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2555 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2556 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2557 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2559 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2561 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2562 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2563 be printed without leading spaces.
2565 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2566 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2571 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2572 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2573 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2575 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2577 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2578 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2580 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2581 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2583 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2584 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2586 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2588 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2590 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2592 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2593 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2595 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2597 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2599 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2600 byte offsets are specified.
2603 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2606 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2609 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2610 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2611 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2612 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2613 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2614 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2615 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2616 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2617 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2618 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2619 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2620 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2621 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2622 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2623 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2624 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2625 directory where M has write access.
2626 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2627 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2628 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2631 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2632 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2633 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2634 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2635 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2636 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2637 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2638 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2639 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2640 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2641 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2642 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2643 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2644 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2645 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2646 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2647 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2648 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2649 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2650 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2651 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2652 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2653 appeared one additional time.
2655 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2656 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2657 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2658 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2661 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2662 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2663 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2664 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2665 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2666 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2667 if there were more than 338.
2669 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2670 - false --help now exits nonzero
2673 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2674 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2675 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2676 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2679 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2680 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2681 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2682 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2683 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2686 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2687 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2688 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2689 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2690 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2691 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2692 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2695 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2696 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2697 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2698 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2699 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2700 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2702 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2703 under certain unusual conditions
2704 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2705 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2708 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2709 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2710 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2711 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2712 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2713 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2714 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2715 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2716 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2717 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2718 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2719 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2720 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2721 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2722 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2723 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2726 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2727 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2730 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2731 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2732 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2733 involving hard-linked directories
2734 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2735 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2736 character-special and block files
2739 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2740 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2741 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2742 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2743 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2744 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2745 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2746 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2747 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2749 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2750 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2751 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2752 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2753 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2754 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2755 specified on the command line.
2756 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2757 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2758 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2759 the first file untouched.
2760 * readlink: new program
2761 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2762 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2763 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2764 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2765 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2766 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2769 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2770 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2771 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2772 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2773 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2774 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2775 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2776 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2777 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2778 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2779 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2780 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2782 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2783 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2784 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2786 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2787 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2788 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2789 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2790 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2791 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2792 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2793 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2796 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2797 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2800 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2801 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2802 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2803 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2804 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2805 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2806 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2809 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2810 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2812 ========================================================================
2813 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2814 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2817 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2819 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2820 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2821 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2822 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2823 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2824 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2825 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2826 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2827 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2828 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2829 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2830 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2832 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2833 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2834 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2835 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2837 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2840 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2842 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2843 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2844 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2845 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2846 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2847 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2848 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2851 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2852 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2853 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2854 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2855 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2856 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2857 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2858 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2859 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2860 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2861 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2862 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2863 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2864 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2865 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2866 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2868 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2869 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2871 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2872 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2873 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2874 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2875 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2876 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2878 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2879 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2880 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2881 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2882 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2883 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2884 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2886 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2887 the source files in the following example:
2888 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2889 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2890 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2891 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2892 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2893 links between source files with --preserve=links
2894 * cp accepts new options:
2895 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2896 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2897 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2898 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2899 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2900 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2901 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2902 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2903 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2905 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2906 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2907 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2908 even though it's older than dest.
2909 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
2910 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
2911 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
2912 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
2913 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
2915 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
2916 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
2917 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
2918 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
2919 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
2920 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
2921 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
2923 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
2924 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
2925 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
2927 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
2928 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
2929 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
2930 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
2931 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
2932 This is the default.
2934 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
2935 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
2936 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
2937 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
2938 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
2940 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
2943 ========================================================================
2944 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
2945 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2948 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
2949 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
2951 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2952 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
2953 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
2954 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
2955 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
2957 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
2958 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
2959 that specifies a non-directory
2962 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
2963 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
2964 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
2965 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
2966 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2967 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
2968 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
2969 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2970 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
2971 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
2972 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
2973 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
2974 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
2975 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
2976 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
2977 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
2978 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
2979 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
2980 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
2981 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
2982 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
2983 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
2984 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
2985 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
2987 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
2988 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
2989 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
2991 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
2993 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
2994 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
2996 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
2997 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
2998 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
2999 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3000 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3002 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3003 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3004 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3005 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3006 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3008 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3010 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3011 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3012 * still more portability fixes
3013 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3014 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3016 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3018 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3020 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3022 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3023 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3024 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3025 there is any time remaining
3026 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3028 ========================================================================
3029 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3030 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3032 This package began as the union of the following:
3033 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3035 ========================================================================
3037 Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3039 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3040 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3041 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3042 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3043 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3044 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.