1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
8 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
9 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
11 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
12 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
14 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
15 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
17 ** Changes in behavior
19 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
20 when -v or -c specified.
24 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
25 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
26 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
27 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
28 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
29 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
30 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
34 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
35 For example `shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2` no longer exhausts memory.
37 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
40 stat -f now also recognizes the GPFS file system type.
44 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
45 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
48 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
52 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
53 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
55 ** Changes in behavior
57 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
58 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
59 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
60 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
61 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
62 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
64 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
65 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
66 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
70 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
73 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
77 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
78 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
79 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
81 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
82 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
83 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
85 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
86 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
87 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
89 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
90 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
92 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
93 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
95 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
96 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
98 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
99 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
103 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
104 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
105 processed portion thereof.
107 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
108 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
110 ** Changes in behavior
112 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
113 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
114 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
116 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
117 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
118 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
120 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
121 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
123 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
124 Use --preserve-context instead.
126 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
129 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
133 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
134 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
135 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
136 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
137 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
139 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
140 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
142 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
143 reject file names invalid for that file system.
145 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
146 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
150 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
151 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
152 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
153 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
154 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
155 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
156 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
157 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
159 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
160 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
161 the same number of fields are output for each line.
163 ** Changes in behavior
165 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
166 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
167 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
170 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
174 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
175 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
176 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
179 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
183 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
184 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
186 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
187 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
189 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
190 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
192 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
193 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
194 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
195 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
197 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
198 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
200 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
201 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
202 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
204 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
206 ** Changes in behavior
208 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
209 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
210 to the number of available processors.
214 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
217 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
221 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
222 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
223 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
224 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
226 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
227 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
228 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
230 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
231 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
233 ** Changes in behavior
235 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
236 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
238 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
239 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
240 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
241 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
242 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
243 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
245 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
246 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
247 the same way as the others.
250 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
254 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
255 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
256 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
258 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
259 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
261 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
262 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
263 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
265 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
266 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
268 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
269 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
271 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
272 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
273 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
275 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
276 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
277 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
278 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
282 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
283 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
285 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
288 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
289 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
291 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
293 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
294 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
295 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
297 ** Changes in behavior
299 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
300 rather than its aliased target.
302 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
303 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
304 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
306 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
307 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
308 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
309 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
310 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
311 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
312 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
313 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
315 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
317 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
319 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
320 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
323 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
324 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
325 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
326 control like taskset for example.
328 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
330 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
331 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
332 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
333 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
334 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
335 includes %C when context information is available.
337 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
338 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
339 rather than a file system attribute.
341 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
342 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
343 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
344 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
346 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
347 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
348 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
350 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
351 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
352 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
355 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
359 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
360 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
362 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
364 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
365 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
367 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
368 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
369 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
370 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
372 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
373 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
374 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
378 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
379 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
381 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
382 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
383 duration after the initial signal was sent.
385 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
386 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
387 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
388 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
389 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
390 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
391 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
392 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
393 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
395 ** Changes in behavior
397 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
398 sequence when it would be a no-op.
400 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
401 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
404 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
408 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
409 of available processors, which may not have been the case
410 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
411 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
415 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
416 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
418 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
419 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
420 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
421 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
423 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
424 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
425 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
428 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
432 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
433 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
434 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
436 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
437 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
438 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
440 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
441 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
443 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
444 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
445 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
446 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
448 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
449 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
450 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
452 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
453 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
454 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
455 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
457 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
458 renamed-aside and then recreated.
459 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
461 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
462 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
463 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
464 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
466 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
467 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
468 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
470 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
471 processes will not intersperse their output.
472 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
475 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
479 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
480 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
482 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
483 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
485 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
486 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
487 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
488 the presence of the empty string argument.
489 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
491 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
492 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
493 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
494 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
496 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
497 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
499 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
500 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
501 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
503 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
504 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
505 and with a malicious user on the same system
506 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
507 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
510 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
514 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
515 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
516 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
518 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
519 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
520 offending directory and all "contents."
522 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
523 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
524 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
526 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
527 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
528 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
530 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
531 processes will not intersperse their output.
532 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
533 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
535 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
536 output the name of the file to stdout.
537 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
539 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
540 call fails with errno == EACCES.
541 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
543 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
544 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
547 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
548 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
549 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
551 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
552 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
553 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
554 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
555 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
556 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
558 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
559 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
560 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
561 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
563 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
564 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
566 ** Changes in behavior
568 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
569 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
570 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
571 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
572 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
574 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
575 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
576 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
577 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
579 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
581 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
582 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
583 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
584 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
585 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
589 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
593 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
594 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
596 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
597 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
599 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
600 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
601 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
603 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
604 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
607 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
611 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
612 when the source file doesn't have write access.
613 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
615 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
616 to accommodate leap seconds.
617 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
619 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
620 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
621 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
623 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
625 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
626 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
627 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
629 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
630 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
631 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
632 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
633 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
637 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
638 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
639 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
640 directory or a symlink to a directory.
642 ** Changes in behavior
644 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
645 environment variable is set.
647 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
648 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
649 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
653 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
654 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
655 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
656 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
658 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
659 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
660 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
661 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
665 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
666 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
667 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
669 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
670 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
671 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
672 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
673 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
674 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
677 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
678 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
681 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
685 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
686 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
687 and libraries tested at configure time.
688 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
690 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
691 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
693 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
694 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
696 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
697 printing a summary to stderr.
698 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
700 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
701 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
702 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
704 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
705 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
707 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
708 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
709 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
710 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
712 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
713 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
714 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
715 which is relatively unusual.
716 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
718 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
719 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
720 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
721 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
722 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
723 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
724 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
728 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
729 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
730 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
731 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
732 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
736 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
737 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
739 ** Changes in behavior
741 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
742 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
743 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
744 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
745 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
748 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
752 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
753 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
755 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
756 before data copying has started.
758 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
759 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
761 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
762 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
763 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
764 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
766 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
767 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
768 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
769 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
771 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
776 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
777 for its standard streams.
779 ** Changes in behavior
781 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
782 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
783 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
784 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
785 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
786 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
788 ** Deprecated options
790 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
791 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
795 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
797 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
798 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
801 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
803 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
804 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
806 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
807 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
810 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
814 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
815 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
816 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
817 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
819 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
820 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
821 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
822 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
823 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
828 make check: two tests have been corrected
832 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
833 inherited from gnulib.
836 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
840 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
841 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
842 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
843 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
845 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
846 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
848 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
850 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
851 systems without xattr support.
853 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
854 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
855 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
857 ** Changes in behavior
859 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
860 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
861 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
862 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
864 ** Improved robustness
866 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
867 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
868 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
869 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
870 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
871 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
872 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
873 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
874 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
878 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
879 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
881 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
882 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
883 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
884 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
885 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
888 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
892 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
893 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
894 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
898 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
899 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
900 data was read, or on process exit.
901 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
903 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
904 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
905 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
906 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
908 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
909 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
910 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
911 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
913 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
914 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
916 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
917 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
919 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
920 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
921 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
923 ** Changes in behavior
925 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
926 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
927 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
929 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
930 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
932 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
933 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
934 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
937 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
941 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
943 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
944 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
945 install: Never copies xattrs
947 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
948 from overwriting any existing destination file
950 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
951 mode where this feature is available.
953 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
954 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
955 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
956 do not modify the destination at all.
958 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
960 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
964 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
965 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
967 cp uses much less memory in some situations
969 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
970 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
972 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
973 processing the first file name
975 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
976 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
977 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
978 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
980 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
981 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
983 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
984 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
987 ** Changes in behavior
989 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
990 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
992 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
993 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
994 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
996 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
997 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
999 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1001 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1002 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1003 is still marked with a '+'.
1006 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1010 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1011 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1015 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1016 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1017 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1018 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1019 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1020 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1022 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1023 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1025 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1026 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1028 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1030 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1031 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1032 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1034 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1035 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1037 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1038 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1039 used to factor large numbers.
1041 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1044 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1046 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1048 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1049 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1051 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1052 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1053 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1054 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1056 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1057 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1058 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1060 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1061 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1065 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1067 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1068 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1070 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1071 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1073 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1075 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1076 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1080 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1081 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1082 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1084 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1086 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1087 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1088 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1090 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1091 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1092 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1094 ** Changes in behavior
1096 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1097 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1100 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1104 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1106 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1107 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1108 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1110 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1111 with no USERNAME argument.
1113 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1114 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1115 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1117 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1118 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1119 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1120 number of fields for some inputs.
1122 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1123 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1125 ** Changes in behavior
1127 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1128 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1131 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1135 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1137 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1138 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1139 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1140 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1142 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1143 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1145 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1146 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1148 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1149 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1151 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1152 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1153 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1154 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1156 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1157 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1158 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1159 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1160 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1161 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1163 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1164 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1166 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1167 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1168 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1170 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1171 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1173 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1174 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1176 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1177 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1178 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1179 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1181 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1182 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1184 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1185 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1187 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1188 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1189 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1193 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1194 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1196 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1197 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1198 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1199 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1203 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1204 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1206 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1208 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1212 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1213 which have negative errno values.
1217 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1221 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1225 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1226 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1229 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1233 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1234 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1235 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1237 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1238 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1239 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1240 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1244 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1245 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1246 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1247 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1250 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1254 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1256 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1257 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1258 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1261 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1265 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1266 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1268 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1270 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1272 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1274 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1278 ** Changes in behavior
1280 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1281 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1283 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1284 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1286 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1287 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1288 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1292 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1293 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1294 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1295 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1296 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1297 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1298 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1299 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1300 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1301 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1302 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1304 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1305 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1306 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1309 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1312 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1313 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1314 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1316 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1317 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1318 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1321 ** New build options
1323 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1324 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1325 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1326 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1328 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1329 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1330 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1331 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1332 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1333 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1334 of "make check" fail.
1336 ** Remove deprecated options
1338 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1339 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1340 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1341 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1342 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1344 ** Improved robustness
1346 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1347 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1348 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1349 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1350 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1351 loss of the contents of a/f.
1353 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1354 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1358 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1359 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1360 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1362 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1363 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1364 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1365 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1367 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1368 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1369 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1370 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1371 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1372 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1373 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1374 destination is a symlink.
1376 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1378 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1379 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1381 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1382 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1384 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1386 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1387 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1389 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1390 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1392 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1395 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1396 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1398 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1399 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1401 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1402 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1403 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1404 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1406 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1407 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1408 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1410 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1411 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1412 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1414 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1415 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1416 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1417 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1419 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1420 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1421 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1423 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1424 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1426 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1427 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1429 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1431 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1432 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1433 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1435 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1436 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1438 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1439 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1441 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1442 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1444 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1445 [present in the original version]
1448 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1452 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1454 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1455 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1456 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1458 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1459 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1461 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1465 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1466 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1468 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1469 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1471 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1472 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1474 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1475 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1476 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1477 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1478 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1479 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1481 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1482 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1485 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1486 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1488 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1491 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1492 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1493 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1495 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1496 directory is unreadable.
1498 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1499 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1500 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1502 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1503 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1504 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1505 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1506 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1509 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1510 Before it would print nothing.
1512 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1514 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1515 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1516 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1517 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1518 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1519 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1520 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1521 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1523 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1527 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1528 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1529 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1531 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1532 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1533 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1534 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1537 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1541 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1542 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1543 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1544 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1545 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1546 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1547 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1549 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1550 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1551 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1552 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1553 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1554 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1555 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1556 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1558 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1559 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1560 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1563 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1567 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1568 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1570 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1571 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1572 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1574 ** Improved robustness
1576 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1577 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1578 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1581 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1585 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1586 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1587 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1588 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1589 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1591 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1595 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1598 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1602 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1603 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1604 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1605 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1607 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1608 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1610 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1611 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1612 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1615 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1617 ** Improved robustness
1619 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1620 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1622 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1623 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1624 or NFS-mounted partition.
1626 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1627 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1631 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1632 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1633 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1634 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1635 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1636 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1638 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1639 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1641 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1642 or neglect to report file removal.
1644 For the "groups" command:
1646 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1647 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1649 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1651 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1653 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1657 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1658 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1661 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1663 ** Changes in behavior
1665 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1666 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1667 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1668 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1670 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1671 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1672 a final `./' or `../' component.
1674 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1675 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1676 this only for pipes.
1678 ** Infrastructure changes
1680 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1681 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1682 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1683 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1687 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1688 name is "." or "..".
1690 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1691 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1692 dirent.d_type support.
1694 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1695 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1697 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1698 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1699 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1700 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1703 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1705 ** Changes in behavior
1707 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1711 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1712 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1716 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1717 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1718 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1720 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1721 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1723 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1724 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1726 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1728 ** Improved robustness
1730 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1731 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1732 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1734 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1735 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1738 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1739 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1741 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1742 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1744 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1745 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1747 ** Changes in behavior
1749 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1750 where the two are distinct.
1752 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1753 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1754 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1755 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1756 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1757 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1758 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1759 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1760 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1761 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1762 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1763 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1764 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1765 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1766 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1767 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1768 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1770 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1771 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1772 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1774 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1775 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1776 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1777 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1780 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1781 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1785 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1786 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1787 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1788 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1790 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1791 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1792 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1794 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1795 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1796 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1797 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1798 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1801 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1802 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1804 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1805 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1806 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1807 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1809 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1810 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1811 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1813 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1814 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1815 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1816 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1818 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1819 and sticky) with the -m option.
1821 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1822 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1823 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1824 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1825 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1827 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1828 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1830 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1834 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1835 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1836 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1837 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1839 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1841 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1843 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1844 silently ignoring one of them.
1846 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1847 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1848 containing this change was 5.92.
1850 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1851 automatically newline terminated.
1853 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1854 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1855 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1856 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1859 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1860 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1861 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1864 ** Scheduled for removal
1866 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1867 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1869 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1870 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1871 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1872 command to unlink a directory.
1874 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1875 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1876 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1877 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1881 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1882 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1883 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1884 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1885 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1886 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1890 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1891 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1893 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1895 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1896 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1897 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1899 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1900 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1903 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1904 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1906 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1907 list directories before files.
1909 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1910 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1911 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1912 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1915 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1917 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1919 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1920 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1921 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1923 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1924 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1928 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1929 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1930 usually printing nothing.
1932 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1934 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1935 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1936 them with hard-linked directories.
1938 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1939 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1940 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1942 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1943 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1944 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1946 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1949 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1950 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1952 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1953 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1955 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1956 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1958 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1959 all command-line arguments.
1961 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1963 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1965 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1966 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1968 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1970 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1971 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1972 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1973 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1974 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1976 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1977 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1979 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1980 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1981 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1982 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1984 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1986 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1990 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1991 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1993 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1994 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1996 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1997 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1999 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2000 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
2002 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2003 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2005 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2007 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2008 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2009 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2012 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2014 ** Build-related bug fixes
2016 installing .mo files would fail
2019 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2023 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2025 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2028 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2032 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2033 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2037 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2039 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2040 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2042 ** Deprecated options
2044 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2045 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
2047 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2051 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2053 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2054 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2055 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2056 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2058 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2061 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2067 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2072 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2074 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2076 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2077 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2078 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2080 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2081 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2082 problematic usages. These include:
2084 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2085 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2086 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2087 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2088 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2089 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2090 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2091 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2092 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2094 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2095 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2097 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2098 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2099 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2100 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2102 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2103 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2104 between binary and text files.
2106 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2110 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2114 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2115 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2117 head tac tail tee tr
2118 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2120 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2121 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2123 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2124 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2125 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2127 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2129 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2131 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2132 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2133 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2137 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2139 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2140 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2142 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2143 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2144 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2148 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2149 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2153 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2154 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2155 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2159 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2160 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2164 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2166 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2168 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2172 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2173 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2174 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2176 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2177 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2178 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2179 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2180 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2182 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2186 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2187 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2188 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2190 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2192 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2193 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2194 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2195 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2197 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2199 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2200 rather than silently wrapping around.
2202 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2203 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2205 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2206 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2208 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2209 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2210 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2211 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2213 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2215 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2217 ** Improved robustness
2219 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2220 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2221 no matter how large the result.
2223 ** Improved portability
2225 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2226 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2228 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2230 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2231 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2232 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2234 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2235 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2239 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2240 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2242 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2244 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2245 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2246 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2247 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2249 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2250 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2252 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2253 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2254 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2256 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2258 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2259 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2261 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2262 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2264 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2266 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2267 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2269 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2270 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2272 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2273 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2274 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2276 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2278 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2280 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2284 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2286 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2287 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2288 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2290 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2291 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2293 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2294 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2295 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2297 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2298 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2300 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2301 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2302 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2303 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2305 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2306 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2308 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2309 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2310 the file system does not support it.
2312 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2314 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2315 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2317 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2319 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2320 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2322 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2323 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2324 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2325 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2327 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2328 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2331 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2332 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2333 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2334 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2336 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2337 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2338 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2339 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2341 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2342 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2344 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2346 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2347 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2348 reporting incorrect results.
2352 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2353 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2355 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2358 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2360 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2361 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2363 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2364 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2366 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2369 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2370 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2371 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2372 the file name does not look like a page range.
2374 printf has several changes:
2376 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2377 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2379 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2380 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2381 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2383 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2384 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2387 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2388 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2390 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2391 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2393 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2395 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2396 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2398 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2400 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2402 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2403 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2404 when first encountering the directory.
2408 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2409 output; POSIX requires this.
2411 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2412 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2414 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2416 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2417 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2419 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2420 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2422 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2423 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2424 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2425 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2426 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2427 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2428 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2430 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2431 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2432 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2434 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2435 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2437 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2439 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2441 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2442 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2443 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2444 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2446 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2450 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2451 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2452 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2453 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2454 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2456 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2457 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2458 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2460 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2461 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2463 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2464 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2466 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2467 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2468 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2469 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2470 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2472 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2473 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2475 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2476 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2478 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2480 nocreat do not create the output file
2481 excl fail if the output file already exists
2482 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2483 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2485 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2487 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2488 direct use direct I/O for data
2489 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2490 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2491 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2492 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2493 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2495 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2497 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2498 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2501 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2502 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2503 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2504 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2505 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2506 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2508 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2509 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2511 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2514 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2516 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2518 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2519 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2521 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2522 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2523 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2525 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2526 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2527 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2529 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2531 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2532 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2534 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2535 for compatibility with bash.
2537 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2539 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2540 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2541 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2542 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2544 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2545 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2547 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2548 ls supports TABSIZE.
2549 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2550 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2551 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2553 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2556 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2558 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2559 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2560 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2561 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2562 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2563 an offset, not as a file name.
2565 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2566 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2568 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2569 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2571 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2572 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2574 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2575 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2576 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2578 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2579 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2581 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2582 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2586 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2588 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2590 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2594 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2595 or more arguments between partitions.
2597 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2598 holes in the destination.
2600 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2601 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2602 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2603 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2604 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2605 terminates immediately.
2607 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2609 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2611 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2612 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2613 not the empty string.
2615 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2616 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2620 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2621 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2622 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2625 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2632 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2636 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2637 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2639 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2640 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2642 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2643 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2644 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2647 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2651 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2652 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2654 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2655 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2657 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2658 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2659 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2661 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2663 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2666 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2668 ** Configuration option
2670 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2671 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2675 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2676 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2680 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2681 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2682 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2685 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2686 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2687 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2688 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2689 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2690 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2691 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2694 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2698 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2699 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2700 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2702 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2703 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2705 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2707 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2708 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2709 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2710 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2712 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2714 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2715 not just the ones that reference directories
2717 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2718 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2720 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2721 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2722 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2724 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2725 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2726 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2727 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2728 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2729 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2731 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2736 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2737 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2739 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2741 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2743 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2745 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2746 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2748 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2749 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2751 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2753 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2757 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2759 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2761 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2762 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2763 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2764 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2765 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2767 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2768 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2770 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2771 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2773 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2774 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2776 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2777 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2778 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2782 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2783 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2784 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2785 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2786 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2787 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2788 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2789 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2790 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2791 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2792 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2793 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2794 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2795 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2797 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2799 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2800 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2802 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2804 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2806 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2807 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2809 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2811 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2812 without a trailing newline.
2814 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2815 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2817 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2820 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2824 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2826 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2828 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2829 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2830 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2831 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2833 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2835 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2836 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2837 be printed without leading spaces.
2839 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2840 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2845 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2846 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2847 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2849 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2851 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2852 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2854 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2855 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2857 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2858 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2860 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2862 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2864 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2866 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2867 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2869 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2871 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2873 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2874 byte offsets are specified.
2877 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2880 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2883 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2884 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2885 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2886 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2887 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2888 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2889 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2890 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2891 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2892 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2893 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2894 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2895 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2896 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2897 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2898 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2899 directory where M has write access.
2900 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2901 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2902 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2905 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2906 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2907 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2908 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2909 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2910 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2911 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2912 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2913 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2914 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2915 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2916 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2917 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2918 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2919 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2920 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2921 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2922 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2923 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2924 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2925 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2926 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2927 appeared one additional time.
2929 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2930 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2931 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2932 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2935 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2936 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2937 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2938 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2939 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2940 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2941 if there were more than 338.
2943 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2944 - false --help now exits nonzero
2947 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2948 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2949 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2950 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2953 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2954 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2955 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2956 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2957 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2960 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2961 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2962 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2963 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2964 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2965 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2966 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2969 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2970 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2971 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2972 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2973 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2974 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2976 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2977 under certain unusual conditions
2978 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2979 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2982 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2983 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2984 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2985 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2986 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2987 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2988 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2989 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2990 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2991 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2992 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2993 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2994 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2995 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2996 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2997 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3000 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3001 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3004 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3005 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3006 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3007 involving hard-linked directories
3008 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3009 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
3010 character-special and block files
3013 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3014 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3015 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3016 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3017 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3018 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3019 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3020 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3021 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3023 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
3024 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
3025 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3026 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3027 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3028 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3029 specified on the command line.
3030 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3031 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
3032 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3033 the first file untouched.
3034 * readlink: new program
3035 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3036 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3037 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3038 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3039 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3040 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3043 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3044 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3045 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3046 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3047 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3048 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3049 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3050 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3051 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3052 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3053 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3054 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3056 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3057 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3058 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3060 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3061 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3062 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3063 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3064 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3065 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3066 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3067 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3070 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3071 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3074 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3075 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3076 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3077 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3078 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3079 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3080 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3083 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3084 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3086 ========================================================================
3087 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3088 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3091 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3093 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3094 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3095 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3096 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3097 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3098 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3099 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3100 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3101 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3102 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3103 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3104 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3106 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3107 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3108 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3109 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3111 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3114 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3116 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3117 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3118 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3119 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3120 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3121 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3122 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3125 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3126 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3127 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3128 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3129 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3130 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3131 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3132 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3133 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3134 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3135 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3136 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3137 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3138 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3139 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3140 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3142 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3143 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3145 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3146 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3147 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3148 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3149 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3150 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3152 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3153 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3154 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3155 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3156 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3157 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3158 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3160 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3161 the source files in the following example:
3162 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3163 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3164 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3165 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3166 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3167 links between source files with --preserve=links
3168 * cp accepts new options:
3169 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3170 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3171 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3172 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3173 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3174 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3175 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3176 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3177 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3179 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3180 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3181 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3182 even though it's older than dest.
3183 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3184 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3185 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3186 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3187 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3189 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3190 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3191 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3192 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3193 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3194 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3195 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3197 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3198 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3199 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3201 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3202 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3203 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3204 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3205 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3206 This is the default.
3208 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3209 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3210 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3211 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3212 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3214 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3217 ========================================================================
3218 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3219 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3222 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3223 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3225 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3226 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3227 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3228 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3229 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3231 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3232 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3233 that specifies a non-directory
3236 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3237 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3238 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3239 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3240 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3241 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3242 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3243 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3244 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3245 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3246 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3247 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3248 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3249 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3250 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3251 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3252 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3253 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3254 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3255 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3256 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3257 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3258 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3259 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3261 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3262 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3263 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3265 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3267 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3268 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3270 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3271 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3272 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3273 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3274 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3276 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3277 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3278 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3279 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3280 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3282 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3284 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3285 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3286 * still more portability fixes
3287 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3288 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3290 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3292 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3294 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3296 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3297 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3298 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3299 there is any time remaining
3300 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3302 ========================================================================
3303 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3304 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3306 This package began as the union of the following:
3307 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3309 ========================================================================
3311 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3313 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3314 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3315 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3316 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3317 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3318 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.