1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
8 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
10 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
11 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
13 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
14 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
16 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
17 additional static suffix to output file names.
21 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
22 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
23 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
24 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
25 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
26 typically still point to one of the hard links.
28 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
29 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
30 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
31 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
32 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
36 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
37 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
38 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
41 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
45 realpath: print resolved file names.
49 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
50 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
52 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
53 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
55 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
56 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
57 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
58 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
59 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
60 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
62 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
63 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
64 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
66 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
67 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
68 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
70 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
71 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
72 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
73 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
74 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
76 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
78 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
79 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
81 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
82 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
83 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
85 ** Changes in behavior
87 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
88 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
89 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
90 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
91 usually-short referent instead.
93 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
94 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
95 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
96 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
99 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
103 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
104 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
105 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
107 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
108 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
110 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
111 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
115 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
116 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
118 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
119 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
120 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
121 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
123 ** Changes in behavior
125 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
126 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
127 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
131 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
132 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
133 only .tar.xz files is enough.
136 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
140 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
141 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
142 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
144 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
145 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
147 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
148 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
149 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
150 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
151 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
153 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
154 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
155 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
156 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
157 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
158 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
159 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
160 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
162 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
163 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
165 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
166 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
168 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
169 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
171 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
172 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
173 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
175 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
176 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
177 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
178 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
180 ** Changes in behavior
182 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
183 when -v or -c specified.
185 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
186 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
190 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
191 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
192 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
193 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
194 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
196 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
197 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
198 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
200 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
201 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
202 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
203 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
204 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
205 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
206 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
208 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
209 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
210 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
214 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
215 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
217 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
220 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
221 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
223 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
224 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
226 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
227 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
229 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
231 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
235 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
236 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
238 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
241 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
245 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
246 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
248 ** Changes in behavior
250 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
251 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
252 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
253 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
254 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
255 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
257 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
258 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
259 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
263 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
266 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
270 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
271 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
272 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
274 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
275 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
276 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
278 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
279 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
280 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
282 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
283 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
285 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
286 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
288 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
289 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
291 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
292 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
296 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
297 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
298 processed portion thereof.
300 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
301 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
303 ** Changes in behavior
305 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
306 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
307 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
309 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
310 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
311 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
313 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
314 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
316 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
317 Use --preserve-context instead.
319 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
322 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
326 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
327 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
328 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
329 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
330 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
332 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
333 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
335 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
336 reject file names invalid for that file system.
338 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
339 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
343 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
344 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
345 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
346 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
347 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
348 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
349 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
350 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
352 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
353 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
354 the same number of fields are output for each line.
356 ** Changes in behavior
358 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
359 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
360 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
363 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
367 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
368 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
369 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
372 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
376 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
377 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
379 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
380 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
382 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
383 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
385 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
386 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
387 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
388 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
390 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
391 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
393 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
394 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
395 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
397 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
399 ** Changes in behavior
401 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
402 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
403 to the number of available processors.
407 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
410 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
414 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
415 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
416 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
417 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
419 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
420 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
421 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
423 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
424 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
426 ** Changes in behavior
428 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
429 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
431 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
432 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
433 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
434 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
435 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
436 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
438 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
439 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
440 the same way as the others.
443 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
447 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
448 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
449 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
451 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
452 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
454 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
455 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
456 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
458 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
459 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
461 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
462 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
464 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
465 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
466 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
468 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
469 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
470 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
471 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
475 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
476 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
478 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
481 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
482 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
484 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
486 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
487 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
488 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
490 ** Changes in behavior
492 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
493 rather than its aliased target.
495 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
496 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
497 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
499 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
500 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
501 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
502 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
503 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
504 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
505 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
506 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
508 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
510 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
512 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
513 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
516 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
517 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
518 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
519 control like taskset for example.
521 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
523 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
524 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
525 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
526 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
527 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
528 includes %C when context information is available.
530 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
531 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
532 rather than a file system attribute.
534 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
535 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
536 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
537 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
539 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
540 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
541 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
543 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
544 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
545 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
548 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
552 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
553 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
555 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
557 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
558 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
560 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
561 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
562 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
563 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
565 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
566 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
567 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
571 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
572 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
574 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
575 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
576 duration after the initial signal was sent.
578 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
579 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
580 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
581 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
582 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
583 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
584 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
585 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
586 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
588 ** Changes in behavior
590 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
591 sequence when it would be a no-op.
593 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
594 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
597 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
601 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
602 of available processors, which may not have been the case
603 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
604 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
608 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
609 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
611 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
612 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
613 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
614 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
616 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
617 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
618 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
621 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
625 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
626 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
627 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
629 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
630 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
631 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
633 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
634 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
636 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
637 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
638 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
639 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
641 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
642 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
643 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
645 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
646 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
647 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
648 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
650 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
651 renamed-aside and then recreated.
652 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
654 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
655 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
656 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
657 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
659 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
660 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
661 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
663 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
664 processes will not intersperse their output.
665 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
668 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
672 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
673 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
675 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
676 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
678 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
679 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
680 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
681 the presence of the empty string argument.
682 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
684 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
685 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
686 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
687 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
689 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
690 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
692 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
693 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
694 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
696 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
697 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
698 and with a malicious user on the same system
699 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
700 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
703 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
707 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
708 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
709 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
711 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
712 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
713 offending directory and all "contents."
715 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
716 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
717 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
719 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
720 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
721 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
723 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
724 processes will not intersperse their output.
725 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
726 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
728 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
729 output the name of the file to stdout.
730 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
732 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
733 call fails with errno == EACCES.
734 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
736 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
737 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
740 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
741 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
742 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
744 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
745 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
746 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
747 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
748 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
749 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
751 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
752 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
753 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
754 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
756 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
757 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
759 ** Changes in behavior
761 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
762 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
763 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
764 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
765 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
767 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
768 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
769 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
770 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
772 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
774 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
775 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
776 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
777 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
778 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
782 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
786 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
787 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
789 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
790 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
792 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
793 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
794 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
796 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
797 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
800 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
804 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
805 when the source file doesn't have write access.
806 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
808 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
809 to accommodate leap seconds.
810 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
812 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
813 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
814 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
816 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
818 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
819 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
820 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
822 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
823 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
824 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
825 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
826 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
830 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
831 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
832 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
833 directory or a symlink to a directory.
835 ** Changes in behavior
837 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
838 environment variable is set.
840 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
841 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
842 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
846 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
847 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
848 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
849 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
851 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
852 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
853 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
854 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
858 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
859 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
860 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
862 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
863 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
864 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
865 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
866 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
867 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
870 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
871 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
874 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
878 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
879 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
880 and libraries tested at configure time.
881 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
883 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
884 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
886 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
887 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
889 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
890 printing a summary to stderr.
891 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
893 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
894 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
895 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
897 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
898 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
900 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
901 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
902 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
903 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
905 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
906 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
907 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
908 which is relatively unusual.
909 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
911 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
912 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
913 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
914 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
915 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
916 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
917 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
921 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
922 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
923 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
924 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
925 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
929 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
930 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
932 ** Changes in behavior
934 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
935 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
936 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
937 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
938 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
941 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
945 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
946 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
948 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
949 before data copying has started.
951 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
952 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
954 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
955 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
956 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
957 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
959 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
960 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
961 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
962 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
964 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
969 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
970 for its standard streams.
972 ** Changes in behavior
974 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
975 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
976 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
977 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
978 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
979 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
981 ** Deprecated options
983 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
984 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
988 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
990 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
991 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
994 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
996 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
997 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
999 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1000 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1003 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1007 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1008 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1009 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1010 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1012 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1013 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1014 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1015 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1016 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1021 make check: two tests have been corrected
1025 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1026 inherited from gnulib.
1029 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1033 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1034 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1035 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1036 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1038 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1039 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1041 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1043 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1044 systems without xattr support.
1046 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1047 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1048 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1050 ** Changes in behavior
1052 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1053 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1054 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1055 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1057 ** Improved robustness
1059 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1060 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1061 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1062 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1063 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1064 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1065 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1066 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1067 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1071 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1072 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1074 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1075 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1076 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1077 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1078 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1081 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1085 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1086 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1087 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1091 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1092 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1093 data was read, or on process exit.
1094 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1096 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1097 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1098 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1099 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1101 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1102 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1103 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1104 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1106 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1107 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1109 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1110 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1112 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1113 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1114 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1116 ** Changes in behavior
1118 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1119 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1120 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1122 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1123 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1125 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1126 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1127 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1130 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1134 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1136 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1137 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1138 install: Never copies xattrs
1140 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1141 from overwriting any existing destination file
1143 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1144 mode where this feature is available.
1146 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1147 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1148 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1149 do not modify the destination at all.
1151 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1153 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1157 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1158 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1160 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1162 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1163 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1165 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1166 processing the first file name
1168 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1169 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1170 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1171 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1173 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1174 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1176 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1177 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1180 ** Changes in behavior
1182 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1183 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1185 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1186 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1187 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1189 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1190 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1192 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1194 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1195 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1196 is still marked with a '+'.
1199 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1203 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1204 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1208 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1209 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1210 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1211 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1212 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1213 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1215 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1216 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1218 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1219 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1221 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1223 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1224 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1225 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1227 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1228 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1230 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1231 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1232 used to factor large numbers.
1234 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1237 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1239 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1241 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1242 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1244 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1245 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1246 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1247 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1249 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1250 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1251 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1253 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1254 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1258 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1260 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1261 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1263 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1264 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1266 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1268 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1269 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1273 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1274 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1275 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1277 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1279 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1280 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1281 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1283 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1284 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1285 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1287 ** Changes in behavior
1289 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1290 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1293 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1297 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1298 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1299 'futimens' system calls.
1303 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1305 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1306 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1307 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1309 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1310 with no USERNAME argument.
1312 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1313 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1314 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1316 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1317 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1318 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1319 number of fields for some inputs.
1321 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1322 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1324 ** Changes in behavior
1326 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1327 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1330 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1334 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1336 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1337 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1338 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1339 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1341 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1342 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1344 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1345 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1347 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1348 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1350 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1351 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1352 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1353 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1355 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1356 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1357 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1358 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1359 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1360 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1362 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1363 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1365 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1366 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1367 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1369 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1370 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1372 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1373 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1375 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1376 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1377 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1378 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1380 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1381 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1383 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1384 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1386 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1387 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1388 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1392 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1393 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1395 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1396 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1397 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1398 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1402 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1403 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1405 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1407 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1411 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1412 which have negative errno values.
1416 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1420 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1424 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1425 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1428 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1432 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1433 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1434 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1436 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1437 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1438 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1439 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1443 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1444 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1445 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1446 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1449 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1453 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1455 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1456 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1457 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1460 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1464 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1465 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1467 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1469 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1471 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1473 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1477 ** Changes in behavior
1479 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1480 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1482 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1483 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1485 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1486 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1487 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1491 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1492 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1493 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1494 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1495 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1496 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1497 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1498 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1499 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1500 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1501 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1503 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1504 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1505 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1508 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1511 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1512 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1513 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1515 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1516 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1517 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1520 ** New build options
1522 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1523 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1524 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1525 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1527 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1528 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1529 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1530 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1531 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1532 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1533 of "make check" fail.
1535 ** Remove deprecated options
1537 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1538 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1539 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1540 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1541 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1543 ** Improved robustness
1545 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1546 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1547 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1548 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1549 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1550 loss of the contents of a/f.
1552 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1553 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1557 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1558 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1559 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1561 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1562 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1563 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1564 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1566 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1567 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1568 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1569 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1570 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1571 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1572 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1573 destination is a symlink.
1575 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1577 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1578 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1580 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1581 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1583 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1585 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1586 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1588 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1589 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1591 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1594 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1595 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1597 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1598 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1600 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1601 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1602 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1603 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1605 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1606 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1607 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1609 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1610 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1611 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1613 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1614 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1615 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1616 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1618 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1619 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1620 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1622 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1623 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1625 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1626 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1628 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1630 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1631 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1632 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1634 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1635 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1637 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1638 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1640 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1641 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1643 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1644 [present in the original version]
1647 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1651 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1653 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1654 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1655 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1657 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1658 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1660 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1664 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1665 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1667 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1668 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1670 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1671 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1673 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1674 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1675 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1676 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1677 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1678 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1680 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1681 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1684 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1685 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1687 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1690 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1691 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1692 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1694 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1695 directory is unreadable.
1697 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1698 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1699 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1701 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1702 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1703 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1704 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1705 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1708 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1709 Before it would print nothing.
1711 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1713 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1714 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1715 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1716 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1717 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1718 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1719 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1720 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1722 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1726 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1727 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1728 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1730 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1731 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1732 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1733 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1736 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1740 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1741 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1742 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1743 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1744 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1745 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1746 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1748 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1749 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1750 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1751 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1752 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1753 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1754 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1755 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1757 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1758 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1759 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1762 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1766 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1767 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1769 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1770 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1771 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1773 ** Improved robustness
1775 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1776 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1777 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1780 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1784 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1785 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1786 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1787 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1788 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1790 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1794 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1797 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1801 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1802 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1803 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1804 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1806 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1807 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1809 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1810 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1811 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1814 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1816 ** Improved robustness
1818 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1819 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1821 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1822 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1823 or NFS-mounted partition.
1825 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1826 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1830 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1831 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1832 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1833 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1834 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1835 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1837 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1838 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1840 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1841 or neglect to report file removal.
1843 For the "groups" command:
1845 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1846 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1848 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1850 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1852 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1856 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1857 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1860 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1862 ** Changes in behavior
1864 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1865 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1866 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1867 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1869 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
1870 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1871 a final './' or '../' component.
1873 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1874 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1875 this only for pipes.
1877 ** Infrastructure changes
1879 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1880 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1881 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1882 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1886 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1887 name is "." or "..".
1889 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1890 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1891 dirent.d_type support.
1893 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1894 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1896 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1897 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1898 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1899 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1902 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1904 ** Changes in behavior
1906 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1910 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1911 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1915 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1916 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1917 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1919 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1920 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1922 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1923 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1925 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1927 ** Improved robustness
1929 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1930 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1931 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1933 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1934 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1937 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1938 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1940 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1941 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1943 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1944 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1946 ** Changes in behavior
1948 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1949 where the two are distinct.
1951 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1952 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1953 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1954 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1955 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1956 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1957 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1958 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1959 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1960 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1961 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1962 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1963 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
1964 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
1965 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
1966 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1967 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1969 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1970 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1971 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1973 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1974 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1975 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1976 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1979 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1980 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1984 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1985 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1986 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1987 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1989 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1990 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1991 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1993 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1994 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1995 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1996 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1997 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2000 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2001 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2003 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2004 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2005 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2006 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2008 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2009 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2010 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2012 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2013 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2014 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2015 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2017 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2018 and sticky) with the -m option.
2020 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2021 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2022 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2023 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2024 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2026 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2027 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2029 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2033 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2034 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2035 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2036 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2038 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2040 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2042 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2043 silently ignoring one of them.
2045 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2046 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2047 containing this change was 5.92.
2049 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2050 automatically newline terminated.
2052 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2053 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2054 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2055 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2058 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2059 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2060 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2063 ** Scheduled for removal
2065 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2066 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2068 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2069 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2070 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2071 command to unlink a directory.
2073 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2074 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2075 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2076 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2080 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2081 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2082 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2083 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2084 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2085 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2089 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2090 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2092 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2094 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2095 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2096 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2098 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2099 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2102 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2103 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2105 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2106 list directories before files.
2108 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2109 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2110 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2111 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2114 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2116 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2118 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2119 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2120 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2122 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2123 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2127 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2128 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2129 usually printing nothing.
2131 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2133 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2134 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2135 them with hard-linked directories.
2137 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2138 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2139 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2141 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2142 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2143 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2145 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2148 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2149 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2151 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2152 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2154 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2155 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2157 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2158 all command-line arguments.
2160 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2162 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2164 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2165 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2167 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2169 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2170 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2171 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2172 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2173 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2175 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2176 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2178 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2179 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2180 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2181 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2183 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2185 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2189 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2190 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2192 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2193 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2195 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2196 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2198 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2199 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2201 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2202 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2204 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2206 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2207 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2208 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2211 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2213 ** Build-related bug fixes
2215 installing .mo files would fail
2218 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2222 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2224 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2227 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2231 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2232 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2236 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2238 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2239 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2241 ** Deprecated options
2243 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2244 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2246 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2250 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2252 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2253 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2254 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2255 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2257 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2260 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2266 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2271 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2273 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2275 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2276 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2277 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2279 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2280 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2281 problematic usages. These include:
2283 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2284 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2285 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2286 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2287 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2288 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2289 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2290 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2291 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2293 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2294 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2296 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2297 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2298 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2299 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2301 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2302 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2303 between binary and text files.
2305 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2309 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2313 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2314 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2316 head tac tail tee tr
2317 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2319 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2320 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2322 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2323 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2324 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2326 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2328 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2330 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2331 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2332 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2336 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2338 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2339 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2341 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2342 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2343 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2347 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2348 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2352 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2353 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2354 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2358 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2359 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2363 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2365 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2367 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2371 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2372 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2373 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2375 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2376 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2377 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2378 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2379 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2381 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2385 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2386 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2387 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2389 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2391 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2392 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2393 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2394 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2396 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2398 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2399 rather than silently wrapping around.
2401 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2402 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2404 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2405 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2407 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2408 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2409 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2410 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2412 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2414 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2416 ** Improved robustness
2418 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2419 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2420 no matter how large the result.
2422 ** Improved portability
2424 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2425 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2427 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2429 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2430 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2431 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2433 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2434 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2438 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2439 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2441 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2443 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2444 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2445 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2446 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2448 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2449 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2451 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2452 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2453 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2455 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2457 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2458 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2460 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2461 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2463 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2465 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2466 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2468 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2469 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2471 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2472 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2473 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2475 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2477 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2479 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2483 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2485 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2486 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2487 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2489 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2490 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2492 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2493 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2494 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2496 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2497 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2499 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2500 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2501 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2502 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2504 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2505 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2507 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2508 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2509 the file system does not support it.
2511 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2513 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2514 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2516 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2518 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2519 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2521 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2522 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2523 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2524 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2526 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2527 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2530 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2531 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2532 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2533 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2535 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2536 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2537 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2538 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2540 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2541 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2543 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2545 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2546 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2547 reporting incorrect results.
2551 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2552 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2554 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2557 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2559 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2560 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2562 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2563 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2565 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2568 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2569 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2570 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2571 the file name does not look like a page range.
2573 printf has several changes:
2575 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2576 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2578 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2579 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2580 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2582 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2583 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2586 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2587 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2589 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2590 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2592 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2594 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2595 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2597 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2599 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2601 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2602 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2603 when first encountering the directory.
2607 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2608 output; POSIX requires this.
2610 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2611 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2613 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2615 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2616 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2618 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2619 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2621 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2622 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2623 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2624 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2625 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2626 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2627 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2629 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2630 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2631 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2633 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2634 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2636 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2638 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2640 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2641 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2642 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2643 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2645 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2649 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2650 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2651 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2652 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
2653 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
2655 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2656 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2657 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2659 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2660 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2662 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2663 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2665 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2666 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2667 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2668 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2669 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2671 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2672 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2674 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2675 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2677 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2679 nocreat do not create the output file
2680 excl fail if the output file already exists
2681 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2682 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2684 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2686 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2687 direct use direct I/O for data
2688 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2689 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2690 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2691 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2692 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2694 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2696 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2697 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
2700 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2701 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2702 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2703 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2704 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2705 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2707 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2708 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2710 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2713 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2715 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2717 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2718 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2720 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2721 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2722 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2724 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2725 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2726 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2728 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2730 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2731 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2733 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2734 for compatibility with bash.
2736 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2738 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2739 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2740 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2741 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2743 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2744 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2746 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2747 ls supports TABSIZE.
2748 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2749 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2750 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2752 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2755 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2757 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2758 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2759 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2760 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2761 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2762 an offset, not as a file name.
2764 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2765 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2767 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2768 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2770 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2771 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2773 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2774 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2775 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2777 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2778 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2780 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2781 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2785 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2787 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2789 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2793 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2794 or more arguments between partitions.
2796 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2797 holes in the destination.
2799 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2800 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2801 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2802 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2803 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2804 terminates immediately.
2806 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2808 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2810 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2811 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2812 not the empty string.
2814 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2815 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2819 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2820 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2821 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
2824 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2831 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2835 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2836 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
2838 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2839 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2841 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2842 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2843 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2846 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2850 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2851 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2853 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2854 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2856 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2857 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2858 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2860 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2862 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2865 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2867 ** Configuration option
2869 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2870 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2874 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2875 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2879 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2880 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2881 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2884 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2885 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2886 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2887 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2888 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2889 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2890 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2893 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2897 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2898 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2899 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2901 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2902 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2904 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2906 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2907 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2908 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2909 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2911 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2913 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2914 not just the ones that reference directories
2916 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2917 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2919 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2920 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2921 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2923 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2924 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2925 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2926 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2927 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2928 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2930 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2935 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2936 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2938 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2940 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2942 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2944 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2945 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2947 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2948 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2950 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2952 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2956 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2958 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2960 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2961 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2962 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2963 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2964 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2966 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2967 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2969 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2970 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2972 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2973 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2975 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
2976 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2977 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2981 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
2982 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2983 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
2984 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2985 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2986 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2987 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2988 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2989 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2990 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2991 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2992 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2993 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2994 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2996 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
2998 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2999 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3001 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3003 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3005 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3006 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3008 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3010 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3011 without a trailing newline.
3013 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3014 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3016 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3019 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3023 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3025 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3027 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3028 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3029 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3030 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3032 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3034 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3035 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3036 be printed without leading spaces.
3038 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3039 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3044 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3045 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3046 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3048 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3050 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3051 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3053 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3054 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3056 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3057 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3059 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3061 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3063 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3065 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3066 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3068 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3070 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3072 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3073 byte offsets are specified.
3076 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3079 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3082 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3083 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3084 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3085 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3086 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3087 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3088 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3089 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3090 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3091 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3092 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3093 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3094 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3095 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3096 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3097 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3098 directory where M has write access.
3099 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3100 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3101 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3104 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3105 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3106 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3107 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3108 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3109 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3110 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3111 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3112 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3113 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3114 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3115 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3116 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3117 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3118 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3119 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3120 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3121 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3122 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3123 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3124 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3125 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3126 appeared one additional time.
3128 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3129 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3130 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3131 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3134 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3135 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3136 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3137 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3138 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3139 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3140 if there were more than 338.
3142 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3143 - false --help now exits nonzero
3146 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3147 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3148 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3149 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3152 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3153 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3154 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3155 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3156 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3159 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3160 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3161 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3162 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3163 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3164 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3165 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3168 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3169 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3170 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3171 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3172 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3173 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3175 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3176 under certain unusual conditions
3177 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3178 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3181 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3182 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3183 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3184 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3185 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3186 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3187 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3188 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3189 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3190 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3191 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3192 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3193 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3194 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3195 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3196 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3199 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3200 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3203 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3204 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3205 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3206 involving hard-linked directories
3207 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3208 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3209 character-special and block files
3212 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3213 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3214 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3215 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3216 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3217 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3218 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3219 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3220 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3222 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3223 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3224 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3225 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3226 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3227 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3228 specified on the command line.
3229 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3230 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3231 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3232 the first file untouched.
3233 * readlink: new program
3234 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3235 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3236 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3237 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3238 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3239 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3242 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3243 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3244 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3245 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3246 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3247 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3248 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3249 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3250 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3251 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3252 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3253 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3255 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3256 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3257 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3259 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3260 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3261 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3262 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3263 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3264 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3265 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3266 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3269 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3270 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3273 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3274 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3275 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3276 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3277 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3278 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3279 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3282 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3283 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3285 ========================================================================
3286 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3287 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3290 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3292 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3293 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3294 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3295 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3296 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3297 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3298 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3299 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3300 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3301 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3302 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3303 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3305 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3306 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3307 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3308 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3310 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3313 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3315 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3316 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3317 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3318 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3319 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3320 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3321 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3324 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3325 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3326 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3327 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3328 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3329 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3330 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3331 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3332 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3333 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3334 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3335 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3336 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3337 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3338 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3339 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3341 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3342 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3344 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3345 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3346 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3347 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3348 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3349 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3351 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3352 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3353 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3354 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3355 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3356 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3357 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3359 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3360 the source files in the following example:
3361 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3362 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3363 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3364 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3365 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3366 links between source files with --preserve=links
3367 * cp accepts new options:
3368 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3369 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3370 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3371 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3372 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3373 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3374 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3375 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3376 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3378 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3379 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3380 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3381 even though it's older than dest.
3382 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3383 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3384 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3385 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3386 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3388 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3389 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3390 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3391 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3392 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3393 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3394 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3396 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3397 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3398 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3400 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3401 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3402 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3403 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3404 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3405 This is the default.
3407 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3408 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3409 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3410 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3411 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3413 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3416 ========================================================================
3417 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3418 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3421 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3422 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3424 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3425 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3426 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3427 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3428 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3430 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3431 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3432 that specifies a non-directory
3435 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3436 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3437 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3438 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3439 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3440 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3441 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3442 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3443 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3444 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3445 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3446 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3447 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3448 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3449 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3450 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3451 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3452 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3453 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3454 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3455 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3456 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3457 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3458 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3460 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3461 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3462 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3464 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3466 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3467 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3469 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3470 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3471 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3472 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3473 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3475 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3476 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3477 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3478 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3479 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3481 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3483 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3484 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3485 * still more portability fixes
3486 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3487 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3489 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3491 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3493 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3495 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3496 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3497 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3498 there is any time remaining
3499 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3501 ========================================================================
3502 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3503 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3505 This package began as the union of the following:
3506 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3508 ========================================================================
3510 Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3512 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3513 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3514 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3515 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3516 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3517 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.