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 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
18 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
20 ** Changes in behavior
22 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
23 when -v or -c specified.
27 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
28 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
29 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
30 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
31 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
32 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
33 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
35 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
36 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
37 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
39 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
40 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
41 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
45 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
46 For example `shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2` no longer exhausts memory.
48 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
51 stat -f now also recognizes the GPFS file system type.
55 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
56 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
59 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
63 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
64 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
66 ** Changes in behavior
68 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
69 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
70 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
71 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
72 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
73 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
75 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
76 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
77 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
81 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
84 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
88 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
89 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
90 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
92 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
93 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
94 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
96 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
97 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
98 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
100 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
101 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
103 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
104 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
106 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
107 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
109 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
110 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
114 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
115 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
116 processed portion thereof.
118 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
119 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
121 ** Changes in behavior
123 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
124 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
125 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
127 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
128 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
129 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
131 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
132 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
134 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
135 Use --preserve-context instead.
137 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
140 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
144 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
145 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
146 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
147 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
148 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
150 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
151 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
153 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
154 reject file names invalid for that file system.
156 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
157 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
161 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
162 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
163 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
164 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
165 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
166 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
167 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
168 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
170 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
171 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
172 the same number of fields are output for each line.
174 ** Changes in behavior
176 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
177 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
178 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
181 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
185 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
186 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
187 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
190 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
194 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
195 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
197 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
198 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
200 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
201 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
203 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
204 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
205 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
206 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
208 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
209 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
211 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
212 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
213 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
215 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
217 ** Changes in behavior
219 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
220 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
221 to the number of available processors.
225 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
228 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
232 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
233 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
234 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
235 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
237 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
238 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
239 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
241 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
242 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
244 ** Changes in behavior
246 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
247 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
249 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
250 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
251 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
252 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
253 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
254 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
256 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
257 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
258 the same way as the others.
261 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
265 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
266 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
267 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
269 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
270 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
272 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
273 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
274 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
276 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
277 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
279 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
280 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
282 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
283 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
284 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
286 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
287 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
288 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
289 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
293 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
294 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
296 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
299 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
300 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
302 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
304 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
305 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
306 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
308 ** Changes in behavior
310 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
311 rather than its aliased target.
313 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
314 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
315 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
317 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
318 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
319 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
320 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
321 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
322 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
323 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
324 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
326 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
328 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
330 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
331 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
334 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
335 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
336 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
337 control like taskset for example.
339 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
341 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
342 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
343 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
344 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
345 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
346 includes %C when context information is available.
348 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
349 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
350 rather than a file system attribute.
352 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
353 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
354 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
355 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
357 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
358 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
359 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
361 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
362 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
363 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
366 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
370 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
371 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
373 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
375 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
376 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
378 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
379 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
380 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
381 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
383 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
384 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
385 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
389 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
390 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
392 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
393 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
394 duration after the initial signal was sent.
396 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
397 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
398 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
399 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
400 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
401 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
402 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
403 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
404 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
406 ** Changes in behavior
408 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
409 sequence when it would be a no-op.
411 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
412 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
415 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
419 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
420 of available processors, which may not have been the case
421 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
422 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
426 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
427 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
429 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
430 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
431 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
432 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
434 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
435 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
436 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
439 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
443 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
444 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
445 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
447 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
448 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
449 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
451 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
452 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
454 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
455 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
456 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
457 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
459 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
460 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
461 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
463 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
464 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
465 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
466 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
468 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
469 renamed-aside and then recreated.
470 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
472 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
473 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
474 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
475 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
477 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
478 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
479 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
481 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
482 processes will not intersperse their output.
483 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
486 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
490 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
491 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
493 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
494 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
496 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
497 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
498 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
499 the presence of the empty string argument.
500 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
502 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
503 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
504 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
505 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
507 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
508 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
510 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
511 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
512 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
514 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
515 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
516 and with a malicious user on the same system
517 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
518 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
521 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
525 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
526 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
527 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
529 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
530 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
531 offending directory and all "contents."
533 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
534 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
535 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
537 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
538 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
539 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
541 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
542 processes will not intersperse their output.
543 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
544 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
546 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
547 output the name of the file to stdout.
548 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
550 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
551 call fails with errno == EACCES.
552 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
554 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
555 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
558 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
559 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
560 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
562 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
563 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
564 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
565 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
566 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
567 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
569 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
570 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
571 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
572 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
574 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
575 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
577 ** Changes in behavior
579 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
580 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
581 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
582 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
583 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
585 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
586 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
587 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
588 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
590 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
592 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
593 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
594 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
595 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
596 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
600 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
604 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
605 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
607 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
608 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
610 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
611 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
612 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
614 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
615 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
618 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
622 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
623 when the source file doesn't have write access.
624 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
626 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
627 to accommodate leap seconds.
628 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
630 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
631 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
632 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
634 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
636 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
637 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
638 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
640 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
641 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
642 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
643 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
644 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
648 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
649 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
650 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
651 directory or a symlink to a directory.
653 ** Changes in behavior
655 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
656 environment variable is set.
658 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
659 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
660 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
664 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
665 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
666 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
667 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
669 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
670 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
671 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
672 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
676 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
677 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
678 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
680 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
681 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
682 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
683 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
684 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
685 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
688 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
689 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
692 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
696 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
697 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
698 and libraries tested at configure time.
699 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
701 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
702 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
704 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
705 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
707 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
708 printing a summary to stderr.
709 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
711 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
712 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
713 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
715 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
716 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
718 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
719 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
720 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
721 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
723 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
724 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
725 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
726 which is relatively unusual.
727 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
729 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
730 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
731 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
732 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
733 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
734 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
735 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
739 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
740 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
741 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
742 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
743 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
747 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
748 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
750 ** Changes in behavior
752 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
753 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
754 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
755 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
756 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
759 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
763 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
764 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
766 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
767 before data copying has started.
769 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
770 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
772 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
773 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
774 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
775 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
777 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
778 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
779 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
780 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
782 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
787 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
788 for its standard streams.
790 ** Changes in behavior
792 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
793 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
794 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
795 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
796 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
797 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
799 ** Deprecated options
801 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
802 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
806 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
808 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
809 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
812 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
814 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
815 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
817 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
818 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
821 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
825 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
826 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
827 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
828 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
830 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
831 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
832 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
833 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
834 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
839 make check: two tests have been corrected
843 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
844 inherited from gnulib.
847 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
851 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
852 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
853 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
854 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
856 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
857 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
859 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
861 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
862 systems without xattr support.
864 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
865 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
866 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
868 ** Changes in behavior
870 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
871 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
872 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
873 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
875 ** Improved robustness
877 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
878 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
879 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
880 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
881 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
882 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
883 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
884 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
885 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
889 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
890 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
892 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
893 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
894 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
895 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
896 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
899 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
903 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
904 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
905 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
909 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
910 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
911 data was read, or on process exit.
912 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
914 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
915 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
916 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
917 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
919 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
920 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
921 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
922 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
924 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
925 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
927 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
928 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
930 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
931 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
932 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
934 ** Changes in behavior
936 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
937 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
938 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
940 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
941 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
943 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
944 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
945 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
948 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
952 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
954 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
955 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
956 install: Never copies xattrs
958 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
959 from overwriting any existing destination file
961 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
962 mode where this feature is available.
964 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
965 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
966 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
967 do not modify the destination at all.
969 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
971 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
975 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
976 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
978 cp uses much less memory in some situations
980 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
981 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
983 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
984 processing the first file name
986 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
987 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
988 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
989 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
991 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
992 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
994 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
995 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
998 ** Changes in behavior
1000 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1001 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1003 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1004 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1005 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1007 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1008 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1010 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1012 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1013 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1014 is still marked with a '+'.
1017 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1021 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1022 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1026 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1027 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1028 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1029 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1030 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1031 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1033 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1034 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1036 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1037 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1039 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1041 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1042 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1043 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1045 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1046 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1048 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1049 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1050 used to factor large numbers.
1052 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1055 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1057 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1059 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1060 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1062 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1063 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1064 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1065 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1067 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1068 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1069 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1071 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1072 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1076 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1078 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1079 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1081 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1082 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1084 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1086 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1087 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1091 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1092 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1093 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1095 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1097 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1098 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1099 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1101 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1102 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1103 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1105 ** Changes in behavior
1107 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1108 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1111 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1115 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1117 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1118 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1119 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1121 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1122 with no USERNAME argument.
1124 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1125 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1126 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1128 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1129 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1130 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1131 number of fields for some inputs.
1133 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1134 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1136 ** Changes in behavior
1138 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1139 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1142 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1146 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1148 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1149 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1150 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1151 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1153 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1154 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1156 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1157 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1159 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1160 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1162 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1163 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1164 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1165 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1167 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1168 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1169 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1170 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1171 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1172 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1174 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1175 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1177 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1178 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1179 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1181 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1182 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1184 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1185 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1187 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1188 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1189 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1190 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1192 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1193 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1195 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1196 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1198 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1199 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1200 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1204 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1205 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1207 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1208 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1209 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1210 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1214 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1215 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1217 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1219 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1223 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1224 which have negative errno values.
1228 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1232 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1236 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1237 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1240 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1244 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1245 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1246 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1248 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1249 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1250 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1251 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1255 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1256 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1257 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1258 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1261 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1265 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1267 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1268 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1269 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1272 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1276 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1277 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1279 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1281 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1283 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1285 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1289 ** Changes in behavior
1291 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1292 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1294 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1295 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1297 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1298 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1299 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1303 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1304 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1305 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1306 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1307 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1308 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1309 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1310 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1311 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1312 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1313 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1315 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1316 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1317 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1320 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1323 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1324 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1325 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1327 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1328 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1329 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1332 ** New build options
1334 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1335 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1336 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1337 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1339 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1340 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1341 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1342 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1343 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1344 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1345 of "make check" fail.
1347 ** Remove deprecated options
1349 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1350 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1351 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1352 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1353 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1355 ** Improved robustness
1357 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1358 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1359 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1360 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1361 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1362 loss of the contents of a/f.
1364 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1365 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1369 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1370 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1371 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1373 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1374 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1375 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1376 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1378 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1379 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1380 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1381 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1382 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1383 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1384 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1385 destination is a symlink.
1387 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1389 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1390 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1392 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1393 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1395 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1397 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1398 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1400 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1401 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1403 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1406 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1407 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1409 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1410 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1412 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1413 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1414 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1415 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1417 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1418 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1419 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1421 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1422 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1423 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1425 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1426 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1427 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1428 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1430 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1431 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1432 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1434 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1435 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1437 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1438 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1440 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1442 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1443 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1444 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1446 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1447 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1449 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1450 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1452 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1453 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1455 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1456 [present in the original version]
1459 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1463 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1465 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1466 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1467 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1469 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1470 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1472 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1476 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1477 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1479 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1480 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1482 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1483 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1485 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1486 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1487 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1488 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1489 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1490 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1492 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1493 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1496 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1497 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1499 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1502 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1503 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1504 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1506 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1507 directory is unreadable.
1509 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1510 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1511 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1513 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1514 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1515 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1516 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1517 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1520 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1521 Before it would print nothing.
1523 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1525 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1526 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1527 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1528 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1529 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1530 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1531 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1532 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1534 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1538 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1539 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1540 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1542 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1543 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1544 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1545 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1548 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1552 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1553 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1554 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1555 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1556 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1557 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1558 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1560 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1561 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1562 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1563 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1564 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1565 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1566 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1567 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1569 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1570 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1571 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1574 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1578 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1579 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1581 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1582 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1583 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1585 ** Improved robustness
1587 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1588 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1589 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1592 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1596 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1597 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1598 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1599 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1600 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1602 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1606 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1609 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1613 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1614 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1615 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1616 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1618 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1619 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1621 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1622 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1623 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1626 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1628 ** Improved robustness
1630 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1631 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1633 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1634 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1635 or NFS-mounted partition.
1637 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1638 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1642 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1643 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1644 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1645 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1646 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1647 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1649 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1650 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1652 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1653 or neglect to report file removal.
1655 For the "groups" command:
1657 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1658 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1660 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1662 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1664 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1668 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1669 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1672 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1674 ** Changes in behavior
1676 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1677 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1678 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1679 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1681 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1682 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1683 a final `./' or `../' component.
1685 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1686 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1687 this only for pipes.
1689 ** Infrastructure changes
1691 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1692 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1693 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1694 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1698 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1699 name is "." or "..".
1701 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1702 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1703 dirent.d_type support.
1705 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1706 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1708 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1709 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1710 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1711 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1714 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1716 ** Changes in behavior
1718 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1722 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1723 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1727 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1728 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1729 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1731 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1732 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1734 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1735 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1737 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1739 ** Improved robustness
1741 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1742 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1743 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1745 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1746 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1749 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1750 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1752 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1753 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1755 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1756 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1758 ** Changes in behavior
1760 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1761 where the two are distinct.
1763 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1764 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1765 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1766 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1767 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1768 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1769 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1770 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1771 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1772 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1773 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1774 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1775 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1776 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1777 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1778 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1779 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1781 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1782 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1783 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1785 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1786 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1787 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1788 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1791 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1792 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1796 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1797 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1798 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1799 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1801 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1802 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1803 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1805 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1806 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1807 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1808 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1809 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1812 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1813 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1815 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1816 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1817 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1818 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1820 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1821 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1822 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1824 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1825 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1826 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1827 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1829 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1830 and sticky) with the -m option.
1832 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1833 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1834 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1835 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1836 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1838 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1839 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1841 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1845 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1846 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1847 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1848 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1850 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1852 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1854 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1855 silently ignoring one of them.
1857 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1858 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1859 containing this change was 5.92.
1861 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1862 automatically newline terminated.
1864 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1865 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1866 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1867 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1870 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1871 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1872 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1875 ** Scheduled for removal
1877 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1878 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1880 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1881 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1882 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1883 command to unlink a directory.
1885 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1886 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1887 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1888 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1892 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1893 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1894 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1895 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1896 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1897 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1901 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1902 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1904 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1906 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1907 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1908 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1910 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1911 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1914 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1915 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1917 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1918 list directories before files.
1920 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1921 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1922 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1923 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1926 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1928 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1930 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1931 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1932 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1934 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1935 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1939 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1940 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1941 usually printing nothing.
1943 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1945 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1946 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1947 them with hard-linked directories.
1949 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1950 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1951 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1953 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1954 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1955 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1957 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1960 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1961 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1963 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1964 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1966 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1967 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1969 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1970 all command-line arguments.
1972 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1974 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1976 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1977 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1979 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1981 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1982 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1983 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1984 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1985 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1987 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1988 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1990 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1991 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1992 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1993 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1995 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1997 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2001 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2002 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2004 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2005 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2007 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
2008 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2010 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2011 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
2013 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2014 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2016 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2018 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2019 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2020 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2023 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2025 ** Build-related bug fixes
2027 installing .mo files would fail
2030 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2034 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2036 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2039 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2043 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2044 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2048 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2050 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2051 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2053 ** Deprecated options
2055 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2056 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
2058 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2062 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2064 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2065 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2066 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2067 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2069 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2072 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2078 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2083 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2085 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2087 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2088 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2089 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2091 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2092 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2093 problematic usages. These include:
2095 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2096 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2097 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2098 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2099 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2100 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2101 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2102 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2103 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2105 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2106 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2108 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2109 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2110 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2111 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2113 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2114 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2115 between binary and text files.
2117 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2121 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2125 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2126 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2128 head tac tail tee tr
2129 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2131 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2132 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2134 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2135 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2136 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2138 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2140 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2142 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2143 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2144 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2148 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2150 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2151 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2153 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2154 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2155 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2159 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2160 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2164 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2165 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2166 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2170 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2171 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2175 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2177 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2179 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2183 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2184 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2185 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2187 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2188 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2189 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2190 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2191 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2193 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2197 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2198 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2199 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2201 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2203 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2204 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2205 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2206 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2208 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2210 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2211 rather than silently wrapping around.
2213 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2214 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2216 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2217 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2219 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2220 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2221 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2222 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2224 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2226 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2228 ** Improved robustness
2230 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2231 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2232 no matter how large the result.
2234 ** Improved portability
2236 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2237 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2239 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2241 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2242 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2243 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2245 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2246 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2250 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2251 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2253 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2255 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2256 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2257 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2258 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2260 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2261 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2263 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2264 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2265 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2267 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2269 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2270 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2272 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2273 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2275 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2277 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2278 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2280 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2281 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2283 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2284 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2285 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2287 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2289 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2291 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2295 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2297 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2298 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2299 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2301 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2302 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2304 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2305 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2306 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2308 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2309 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2311 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2312 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2313 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2314 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2316 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2317 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2319 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2320 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2321 the file system does not support it.
2323 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2325 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2326 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2328 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2330 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2331 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2333 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2334 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2335 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2336 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2338 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2339 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2342 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2343 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2344 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2345 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2347 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2348 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2349 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2350 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2352 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2353 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2355 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2357 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2358 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2359 reporting incorrect results.
2363 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2364 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2366 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2369 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2371 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2372 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2374 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2375 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2377 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2380 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2381 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2382 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2383 the file name does not look like a page range.
2385 printf has several changes:
2387 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2388 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2390 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2391 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2392 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2394 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2395 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2398 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2399 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2401 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2402 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2404 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2406 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2407 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2409 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2411 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2413 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2414 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2415 when first encountering the directory.
2419 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2420 output; POSIX requires this.
2422 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2423 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2425 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2427 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2428 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2430 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2431 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2433 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2434 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2435 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2436 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2437 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2438 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2439 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2441 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2442 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2443 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2445 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2446 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2448 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2450 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2452 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2453 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2454 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2455 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2457 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2461 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2462 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2463 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2464 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2465 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2467 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2468 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2469 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2471 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2472 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2474 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2475 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2477 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2478 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2479 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2480 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2481 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2483 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2484 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2486 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2487 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2489 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2491 nocreat do not create the output file
2492 excl fail if the output file already exists
2493 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2494 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2496 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2498 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2499 direct use direct I/O for data
2500 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2501 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2502 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2503 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2504 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2506 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2508 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2509 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2512 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2513 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2514 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2515 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2516 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2517 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2519 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2520 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2522 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2525 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2527 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2529 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2530 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2532 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2533 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2534 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2536 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2537 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2538 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2540 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2542 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2543 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2545 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2546 for compatibility with bash.
2548 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2550 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2551 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2552 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2553 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2555 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2556 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2558 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2559 ls supports TABSIZE.
2560 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2561 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2562 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2564 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2567 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2569 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2570 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2571 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2572 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2573 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2574 an offset, not as a file name.
2576 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2577 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2579 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2580 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2582 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2583 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2585 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2586 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2587 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2589 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2590 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2592 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2593 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2597 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2599 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2601 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2605 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2606 or more arguments between partitions.
2608 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2609 holes in the destination.
2611 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2612 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2613 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2614 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2615 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2616 terminates immediately.
2618 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2620 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2622 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2623 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2624 not the empty string.
2626 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2627 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2631 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2632 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2633 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2636 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2643 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2647 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2648 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2650 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2651 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2653 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2654 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2655 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2658 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2662 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2663 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2665 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2666 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2668 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2669 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2670 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2672 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2674 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2677 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2679 ** Configuration option
2681 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2682 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2686 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2687 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2691 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2692 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2693 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2696 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2697 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2698 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2699 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2700 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2701 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2702 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2705 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2709 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2710 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2711 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2713 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2714 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2716 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2718 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2719 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2720 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2721 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2723 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2725 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2726 not just the ones that reference directories
2728 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2729 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2731 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2732 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2733 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2735 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2736 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2737 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2738 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2739 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2740 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2742 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2747 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2748 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2750 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2752 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2754 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2756 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2757 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2759 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2760 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2762 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2764 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2768 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2770 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2772 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2773 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2774 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2775 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2776 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2778 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2779 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2781 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2782 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2784 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2785 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2787 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2788 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2789 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2793 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2794 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2795 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2796 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2797 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2798 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2799 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2800 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2801 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2802 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2803 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2804 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2805 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2806 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2808 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2810 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2811 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2813 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2815 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2817 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2818 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2820 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2822 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2823 without a trailing newline.
2825 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2826 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2828 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2831 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2835 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2837 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2839 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2840 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2841 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2842 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2844 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2846 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2847 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2848 be printed without leading spaces.
2850 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2851 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2856 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2857 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2858 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2860 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2862 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2863 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2865 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2866 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2868 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2869 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2871 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2873 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2875 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2877 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2878 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2880 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2882 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2884 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2885 byte offsets are specified.
2888 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2891 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2894 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2895 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2896 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2897 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2898 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2899 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2900 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2901 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2902 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2903 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2904 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2905 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2906 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2907 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2908 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2909 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2910 directory where M has write access.
2911 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2912 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2913 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2916 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2917 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2918 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2919 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2920 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2921 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2922 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2923 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2924 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2925 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2926 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2927 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2928 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2929 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2930 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2931 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2932 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2933 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2934 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2935 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2936 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2937 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2938 appeared one additional time.
2940 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2941 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2942 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2943 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2946 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2947 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2948 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2949 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2950 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2951 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2952 if there were more than 338.
2954 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2955 - false --help now exits nonzero
2958 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2959 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2960 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2961 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2964 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2965 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2966 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2967 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2968 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2971 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2972 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2973 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2974 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2975 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2976 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2977 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2980 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2981 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2982 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2983 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2984 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2985 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2987 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2988 under certain unusual conditions
2989 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2990 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2993 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2994 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2995 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2996 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2997 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2998 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2999 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3000 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3001 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
3002 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
3003 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3004 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3005 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3006 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3007 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3008 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3011 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3012 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3015 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3016 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3017 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3018 involving hard-linked directories
3019 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3020 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
3021 character-special and block files
3024 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3025 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3026 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3027 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3028 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3029 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3030 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3031 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3032 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3034 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
3035 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
3036 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3037 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3038 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3039 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3040 specified on the command line.
3041 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3042 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
3043 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3044 the first file untouched.
3045 * readlink: new program
3046 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3047 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3048 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3049 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3050 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3051 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3054 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3055 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3056 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3057 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3058 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3059 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3060 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3061 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3062 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3063 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3064 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3065 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3067 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3068 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3069 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3071 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3072 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3073 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3074 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3075 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3076 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3077 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3078 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3081 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3082 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3085 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3086 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3087 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3088 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3089 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3090 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3091 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3094 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3095 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3097 ========================================================================
3098 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3099 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3102 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3104 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3105 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3106 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3107 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3108 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3109 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3110 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3111 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3112 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3113 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3114 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3115 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3117 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3118 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3119 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3120 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3122 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3125 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3127 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3128 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3129 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3130 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3131 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3132 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3133 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3136 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3137 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3138 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3139 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3140 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3141 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3142 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3143 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3144 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3145 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3146 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3147 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3148 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3149 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3150 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3151 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3153 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3154 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3156 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3157 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3158 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3159 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3160 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3161 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3163 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3164 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3165 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3166 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3167 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3168 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3169 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3171 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3172 the source files in the following example:
3173 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3174 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3175 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3176 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3177 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3178 links between source files with --preserve=links
3179 * cp accepts new options:
3180 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3181 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3182 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3183 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3184 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3185 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3186 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3187 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3188 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3190 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3191 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3192 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3193 even though it's older than dest.
3194 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3195 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3196 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3197 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3198 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3200 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3201 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3202 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3203 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3204 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3205 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3206 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3208 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3209 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3210 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3212 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3213 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3214 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3215 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3216 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3217 This is the default.
3219 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3220 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3221 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3222 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3223 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3225 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3228 ========================================================================
3229 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3230 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3233 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3234 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3236 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3237 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3238 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3239 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3240 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3242 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3243 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3244 that specifies a non-directory
3247 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3248 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3249 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3250 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3251 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3252 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3253 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3254 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3255 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3256 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3257 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3258 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3259 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3260 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3261 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3262 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3263 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3264 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3265 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3266 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3267 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3268 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3269 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3270 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3272 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3273 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3274 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3276 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3278 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3279 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3281 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3282 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3283 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3284 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3285 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3287 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3288 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3289 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3290 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3291 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3293 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3295 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3296 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3297 * still more portability fixes
3298 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3299 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3301 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3303 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3305 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3307 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3308 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3309 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3310 there is any time remaining
3311 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3313 ========================================================================
3314 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3315 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3317 This package began as the union of the following:
3318 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3320 ========================================================================
3322 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3324 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3325 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3326 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3327 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3328 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3329 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.