1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
8 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
9 sha384sum and sha512sum.
13 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
14 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
15 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
16 eventually exits nonzero.
18 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
19 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
20 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
22 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
23 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
24 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
26 ** Changes in behavior
28 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
32 stat and tail work better with ZFS and VZFS. stat -f --format=%T now
33 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files
34 on those file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file system
35 types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
39 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
40 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
41 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
42 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
43 are run without following the instructions in README.
46 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
50 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
51 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
52 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
53 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
55 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
56 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
57 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
58 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
60 sort -u could read freed memory.
61 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
62 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
63 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
67 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
68 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
69 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
70 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
73 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
77 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
78 processes will not intersperse their output.
79 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
81 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
82 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
83 date: invalid date '\260'
84 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
86 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
87 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
88 lines output by df, can work reliably.
89 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
91 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
92 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
93 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
95 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
96 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
97 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
98 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
99 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
100 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
102 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
103 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
105 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
106 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
108 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
109 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
110 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
112 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
113 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
114 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
118 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
120 ** Changes in behavior
122 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
123 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
124 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
125 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
126 have any reason to include it here.
130 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
131 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
132 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
134 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
135 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
136 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
139 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
143 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
144 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
145 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
146 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
147 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
148 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
150 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
151 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
152 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
153 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
154 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
155 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
156 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
158 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
159 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
161 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
162 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
166 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
167 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
169 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
171 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
173 ** Changes in behavior
175 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
176 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
177 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
179 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
180 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
183 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
187 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
188 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
189 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
190 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
191 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
192 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
193 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
194 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
196 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
197 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
198 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
199 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
200 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
202 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
203 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
205 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
206 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
208 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
209 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
211 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
212 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
214 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
215 additional static suffix to output file names.
217 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
218 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
219 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
221 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
222 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
226 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
227 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
228 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
230 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
231 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
232 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
233 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
234 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
235 typically still point to one of the hard links.
237 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
238 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
239 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
240 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
241 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
243 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
244 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
245 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
246 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
250 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
251 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
252 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
254 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
255 instead of causing a usage failure.
257 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
260 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
264 realpath: print resolved file names.
268 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
269 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
271 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
272 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
274 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
275 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
276 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
277 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
278 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
279 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
281 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
282 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
283 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
285 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
286 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
287 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
289 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
290 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
291 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
292 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
293 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
295 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
297 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
298 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
300 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
301 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
302 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
304 ** Changes in behavior
306 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
307 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
308 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
309 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
310 usually-short referent instead.
312 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
313 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
314 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
315 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
318 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
322 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
323 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
324 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
326 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
327 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
329 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
330 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
334 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
335 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
337 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
338 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
339 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
340 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
342 ** Changes in behavior
344 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
345 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
346 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
350 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
351 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
352 only .tar.xz files is enough.
355 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
359 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
360 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
361 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
363 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
364 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
366 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
367 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
368 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
369 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
370 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
372 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
373 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
374 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
375 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
376 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
377 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
378 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
379 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
381 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
382 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
384 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
385 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
387 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
388 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
390 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
391 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
392 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
394 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
395 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
396 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
397 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
399 ** Changes in behavior
401 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
402 when -v or -c specified.
404 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
405 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
409 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
410 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
411 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
412 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
413 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
415 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
416 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
417 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
419 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
420 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
421 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
422 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
423 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
424 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
425 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
427 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
428 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
429 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
433 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
434 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
436 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
439 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
440 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
442 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
443 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
445 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
446 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
448 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
450 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
454 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
455 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
457 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
460 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
464 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
465 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
467 ** Changes in behavior
469 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
470 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
471 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
472 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
473 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
474 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
476 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
477 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
478 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
482 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
485 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
489 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
490 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
491 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
493 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
494 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
495 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
497 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
498 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
499 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
501 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
502 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
504 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
505 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
507 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
508 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
510 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
511 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
515 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
516 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
517 processed portion thereof.
519 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
520 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
522 ** Changes in behavior
524 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
525 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
526 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
528 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
529 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
530 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
532 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
533 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
535 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
536 Use --preserve-context instead.
538 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
541 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
545 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
546 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
547 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
548 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
549 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
551 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
552 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
554 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
555 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
556 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
558 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
559 reject file names invalid for that file system.
561 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
562 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
566 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
567 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
568 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
569 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
570 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
571 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
572 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
573 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
575 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
576 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
577 the same number of fields are output for each line.
579 ** Changes in behavior
581 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
582 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
583 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
586 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
590 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
591 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
592 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
595 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
599 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
600 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
602 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
603 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
605 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
606 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
608 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
609 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
610 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
611 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
613 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
614 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
616 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
617 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
618 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
620 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
622 ** Changes in behavior
624 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
625 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
626 to the number of available processors.
630 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
633 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
637 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
638 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
639 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
640 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
642 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
643 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
644 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
646 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
647 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
649 ** Changes in behavior
651 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
652 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
654 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
655 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
656 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
657 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
658 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
659 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
661 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
662 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
663 the same way as the others.
666 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
670 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
671 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
672 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
674 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
675 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
677 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
678 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
679 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
681 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
682 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
684 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
685 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
687 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
688 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
689 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
691 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
692 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
693 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
694 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
698 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
699 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
701 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
704 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
705 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
707 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
709 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
710 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
711 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
713 ** Changes in behavior
715 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
716 rather than its aliased target.
718 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
719 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
720 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
722 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
723 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
724 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
725 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
726 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
727 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
728 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
729 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
731 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
733 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
735 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
736 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
739 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
740 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
741 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
742 control like taskset for example.
744 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
746 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
747 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
748 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
749 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
750 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
751 includes %C when context information is available.
753 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
754 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
755 rather than a file system attribute.
757 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
758 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
759 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
760 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
762 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
763 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
764 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
766 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
767 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
768 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
771 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
775 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
776 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
778 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
780 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
781 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
783 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
784 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
785 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
786 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
788 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
789 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
790 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
794 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
795 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
797 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
798 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
799 duration after the initial signal was sent.
801 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
802 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
803 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
804 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
805 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
806 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
807 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
808 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
809 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
811 ** Changes in behavior
813 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
814 sequence when it would be a no-op.
816 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
817 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
820 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
824 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
825 of available processors, which may not have been the case
826 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
827 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
831 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
832 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
834 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
835 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
836 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
837 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
839 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
840 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
841 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
844 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
848 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
849 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
850 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
852 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
853 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
854 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
856 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
857 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
859 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
860 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
861 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
862 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
864 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
865 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
866 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
868 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
869 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
870 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
871 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
873 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
874 renamed-aside and then recreated.
875 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
877 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
878 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
879 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
880 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
882 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
883 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
884 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
886 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
887 processes will not intersperse their output.
888 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
891 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
895 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
896 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
898 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
899 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
901 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
902 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
903 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
904 the presence of the empty string argument.
905 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
907 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
908 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
909 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
910 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
912 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
913 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
915 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
916 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
917 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
919 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
920 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
921 and with a malicious user on the same system
922 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
923 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
926 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
930 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
931 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
932 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
934 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
935 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
936 offending directory and all "contents."
938 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
939 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
940 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
942 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
943 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
944 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
946 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
947 processes will not intersperse their output.
948 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
949 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
951 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
952 output the name of the file to stdout.
953 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
955 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
956 call fails with errno == EACCES.
957 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
959 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
960 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
963 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
964 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
965 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
967 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
968 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
969 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
970 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
971 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
972 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
974 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
975 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
976 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
977 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
979 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
980 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
982 ** Changes in behavior
984 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
985 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
986 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
987 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
988 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
990 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
991 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
992 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
993 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
995 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
997 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
998 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
999 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1000 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1001 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1005 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1009 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1010 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1012 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1013 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1015 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1016 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1017 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1019 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1020 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1023 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1027 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1028 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1029 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1031 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1032 to accommodate leap seconds.
1033 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1035 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1036 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1037 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1039 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1041 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1042 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1043 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1045 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1046 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1047 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1048 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1049 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1053 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1054 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1055 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1056 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1058 ** Changes in behavior
1060 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1061 environment variable is set.
1063 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1064 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1065 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1069 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1070 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1071 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1072 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1074 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1075 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1076 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1077 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1081 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1082 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1083 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1085 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1086 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1087 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1088 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1089 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1090 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1091 another improvement:
1093 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1094 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1097 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1101 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1102 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1103 and libraries tested at configure time.
1104 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1106 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1107 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1109 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1110 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1112 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1113 printing a summary to stderr.
1114 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1116 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1117 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1118 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1120 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1121 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1123 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1124 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1125 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1126 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1128 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1129 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1130 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1131 which is relatively unusual.
1132 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1134 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1135 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1136 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1137 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1138 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1139 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1140 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1144 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1145 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1146 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1147 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1148 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1152 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1153 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1155 ** Changes in behavior
1157 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1158 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1159 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1160 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1161 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1164 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1168 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1169 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1171 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1172 before data copying has started.
1174 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1175 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1177 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1178 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1179 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1180 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1182 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1183 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1184 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1185 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1187 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1192 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1193 for its standard streams.
1195 ** Changes in behavior
1197 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1198 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1199 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1200 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1201 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1202 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1204 ** Deprecated options
1206 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1207 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1211 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1213 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1214 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1215 a btrfs file system.
1217 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1219 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1220 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1222 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1223 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1226 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1230 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1231 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1232 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1233 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1235 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1236 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1237 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1238 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1239 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1244 make check: two tests have been corrected
1248 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1249 inherited from gnulib.
1252 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1256 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1257 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1258 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1259 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1261 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1262 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1264 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1266 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1267 systems without xattr support.
1269 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1270 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1271 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1273 ** Changes in behavior
1275 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1276 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1277 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1278 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1280 ** Improved robustness
1282 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1283 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1284 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1285 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1286 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1287 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1288 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1289 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1290 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1294 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1295 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1297 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1298 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1299 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1300 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1301 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1304 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1308 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1309 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1310 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1314 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1315 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1316 data was read, or on process exit.
1317 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1319 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1320 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1321 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1322 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1324 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1325 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1326 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1327 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1329 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1330 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1332 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1333 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1335 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1336 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1337 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1339 ** Changes in behavior
1341 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1342 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1343 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1345 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1346 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1348 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1349 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1350 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1353 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1357 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1359 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1360 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1361 install: Never copies xattrs
1363 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1364 from overwriting any existing destination file
1366 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1367 mode where this feature is available.
1369 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1370 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1371 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1372 do not modify the destination at all.
1374 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1376 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1380 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1381 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1383 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1385 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1386 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1388 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1389 processing the first file name
1391 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1392 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1393 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1394 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1396 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1397 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1399 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1400 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1403 ** Changes in behavior
1405 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1406 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1408 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1409 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1410 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1412 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1413 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1415 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1417 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1418 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1419 is still marked with a '+'.
1422 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1426 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1427 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1431 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1432 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1433 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1434 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1435 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1436 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1438 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1439 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1441 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1442 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1444 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1446 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1447 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1448 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1450 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1451 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1453 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1454 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1455 used to factor large numbers.
1457 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1460 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1462 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1464 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1465 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1467 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1468 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1469 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1470 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1472 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1473 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1474 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1476 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1477 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1481 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1483 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1484 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1486 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1487 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1489 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1491 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1492 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1496 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1497 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1498 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1500 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1502 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1503 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1504 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1506 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1507 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1508 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1510 ** Changes in behavior
1512 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1513 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1516 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1520 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1521 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1522 'futimens' system calls.
1526 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1528 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1529 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1530 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1532 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1533 with no USERNAME argument.
1535 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1536 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1537 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1539 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1540 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1541 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1542 number of fields for some inputs.
1544 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1545 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1547 ** Changes in behavior
1549 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1550 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1553 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1557 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1559 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1560 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1561 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1562 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1564 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1565 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1567 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1568 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1570 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1571 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1573 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1574 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1575 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1576 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1578 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1579 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1580 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1581 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1582 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1583 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1585 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1586 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1588 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1589 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1590 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1592 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1593 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1595 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1596 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1598 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1599 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1600 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1601 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1603 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1604 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1606 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1607 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1609 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1610 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1611 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1615 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1616 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1618 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1619 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1620 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1621 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1625 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1626 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1628 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1630 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1634 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1635 which have negative errno values.
1639 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1643 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1647 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1648 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1651 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1655 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1656 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1657 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1659 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1660 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1661 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1662 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1666 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1667 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1668 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1669 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1672 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1676 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1678 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1679 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1680 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1683 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1687 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1688 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1690 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1692 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1694 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1696 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1700 ** Changes in behavior
1702 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1703 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1705 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1706 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1708 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1709 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1710 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1714 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1715 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1716 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1717 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1718 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1719 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1720 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1721 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1722 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1723 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1724 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1726 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1727 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1728 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1731 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1734 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1735 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1736 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1738 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1739 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1740 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1743 ** New build options
1745 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1746 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1747 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1748 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1750 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1751 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1752 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1753 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1754 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1755 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1756 of "make check" fail.
1758 ** Remove deprecated options
1760 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1761 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1762 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1763 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1764 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1766 ** Improved robustness
1768 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1769 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1770 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1771 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1772 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1773 loss of the contents of a/f.
1775 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1776 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1780 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1781 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1782 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1784 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1785 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1786 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1787 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1789 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1790 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1791 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1792 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1793 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1794 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1795 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1796 destination is a symlink.
1798 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1800 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1801 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1803 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1804 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1806 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1808 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1809 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1811 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1812 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1814 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1817 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1818 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1820 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1821 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1823 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1824 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1825 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1826 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1828 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1829 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1830 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1832 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1833 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1834 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1836 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1837 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1838 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1839 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1841 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1842 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1843 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1845 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1846 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1848 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1849 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1851 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1853 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1854 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1855 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1857 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1858 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1860 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1861 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1863 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1864 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1866 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1867 [present in the original version]
1870 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1874 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1876 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1877 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1878 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1880 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1881 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1883 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1887 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1888 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1890 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1891 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1893 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1894 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1896 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1897 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1898 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1899 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1900 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1901 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1903 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1904 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1907 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1908 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1910 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1913 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1914 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1915 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1917 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1918 directory is unreadable.
1920 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1921 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1922 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1924 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1925 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1926 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1927 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1928 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1931 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1932 Before it would print nothing.
1934 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1936 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1937 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1938 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1939 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1940 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1941 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1942 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1943 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1945 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1949 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1950 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1951 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1953 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1954 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1955 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1956 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1959 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1963 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1964 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1965 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1966 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1967 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1968 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1969 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1971 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1972 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1973 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1974 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1975 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1976 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1977 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1978 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1980 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1981 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1982 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1985 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1989 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1990 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1992 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1993 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1994 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1996 ** Improved robustness
1998 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1999 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2000 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2003 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2007 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2008 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2009 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2010 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2011 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2013 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2017 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2020 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2024 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2025 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2026 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2027 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2029 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2030 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2032 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2033 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2034 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2037 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2039 ** Improved robustness
2041 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2042 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2044 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2045 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2046 or NFS-mounted partition.
2048 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2049 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2053 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2054 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2055 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2056 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2057 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2058 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2060 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2061 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2063 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2064 or neglect to report file removal.
2066 For the "groups" command:
2068 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2069 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2071 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2073 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2075 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2079 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2080 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2083 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2085 ** Changes in behavior
2087 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2088 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2089 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2090 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2092 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2093 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2094 a final './' or '../' component.
2096 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2097 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2098 this only for pipes.
2100 ** Infrastructure changes
2102 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2103 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2104 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2105 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2109 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2110 name is "." or "..".
2112 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2113 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2114 dirent.d_type support.
2116 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2117 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2119 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2120 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2121 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2122 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2125 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2127 ** Changes in behavior
2129 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2133 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2134 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2138 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2139 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2140 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2142 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2143 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2145 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2146 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2148 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2150 ** Improved robustness
2152 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2153 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2154 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2156 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2157 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2160 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2161 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2163 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2164 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2166 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2167 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2169 ** Changes in behavior
2171 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2172 where the two are distinct.
2174 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2175 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2176 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2177 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2178 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2179 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2180 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2181 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2182 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2183 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2184 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2185 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2186 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2187 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2188 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2189 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2190 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2192 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2193 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2194 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2196 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2197 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2198 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2199 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2202 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2203 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2207 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2208 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2209 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2210 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2212 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2213 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2214 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2216 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2217 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2218 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2219 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2220 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2223 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2224 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2226 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2227 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2228 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2229 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2231 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2232 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2233 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2235 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2236 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2237 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2238 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2240 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2241 and sticky) with the -m option.
2243 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2244 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2245 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2246 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2247 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2249 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2250 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2252 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2256 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2257 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2258 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2259 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2261 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2263 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2265 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2266 silently ignoring one of them.
2268 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2269 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2270 containing this change was 5.92.
2272 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2273 automatically newline terminated.
2275 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2276 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2277 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2278 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2281 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2282 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2283 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2286 ** Scheduled for removal
2288 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2289 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2291 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2292 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2293 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2294 command to unlink a directory.
2296 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2297 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2298 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2299 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2303 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2304 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2305 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2306 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2307 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2308 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2312 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2313 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2315 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2317 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2318 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2319 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2321 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2322 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2325 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2326 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2328 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2329 list directories before files.
2331 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2332 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2333 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2334 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2337 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2339 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2341 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2342 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2343 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2345 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2346 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2350 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2351 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2352 usually printing nothing.
2354 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2356 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2357 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2358 them with hard-linked directories.
2360 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2361 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2362 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2364 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2365 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2366 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2368 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2371 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2372 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2374 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2375 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2377 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2378 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2380 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2381 all command-line arguments.
2383 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2385 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2387 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2388 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2390 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2392 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2393 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2394 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2395 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2396 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2398 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2399 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2401 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2402 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2403 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2404 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2406 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2408 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2412 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2413 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2415 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2416 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2418 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2419 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2421 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2422 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2424 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2425 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2427 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2429 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2430 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2431 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2434 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2436 ** Build-related bug fixes
2438 installing .mo files would fail
2441 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2445 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2447 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2450 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2454 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2455 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2459 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2461 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2462 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2464 ** Deprecated options
2466 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2467 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2469 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2473 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2475 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2476 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2477 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2478 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2480 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2483 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2489 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2494 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2496 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2498 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2499 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2500 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2502 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2503 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2504 problematic usages. These include:
2506 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2507 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2508 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2509 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2510 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2511 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2512 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2513 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2514 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2516 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2517 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2519 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2520 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2521 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2522 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2524 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2525 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2526 between binary and text files.
2528 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2532 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2536 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2537 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2539 head tac tail tee tr
2540 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2542 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2543 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2545 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2546 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2547 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2549 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2551 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2553 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2554 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2555 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2559 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2561 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2562 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2564 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2565 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2566 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2570 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2571 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2575 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2576 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2577 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2581 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2582 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2586 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2588 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2590 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2594 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2595 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2596 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2598 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2599 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2600 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2601 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2602 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2604 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2608 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2609 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2610 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2612 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2614 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2615 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2616 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2617 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2619 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2621 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2622 rather than silently wrapping around.
2624 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2625 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2627 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2628 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2630 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2631 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2632 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2633 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2635 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2637 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2639 ** Improved robustness
2641 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2642 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2643 no matter how large the result.
2645 ** Improved portability
2647 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2648 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2650 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2652 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2653 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2654 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2656 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2657 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2661 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2662 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2664 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2666 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2667 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2668 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2669 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2671 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2672 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2674 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2675 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2676 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2678 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2680 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2681 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2683 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2684 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2686 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2688 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2689 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2691 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2692 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2694 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2695 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2696 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2698 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2700 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2702 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2706 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2708 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2709 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2710 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2712 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2713 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2715 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2716 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2717 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2719 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2720 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2722 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2723 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2724 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2725 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2727 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2728 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2730 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2731 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2732 the file system does not support it.
2734 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2736 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2737 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2739 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2741 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2742 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2744 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2745 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2746 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2747 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2749 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2750 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2753 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2754 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2755 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2756 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2758 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2759 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2760 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2761 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2763 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2764 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2766 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2768 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2769 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2770 reporting incorrect results.
2774 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2775 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2777 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2780 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2782 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2783 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2785 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2786 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2788 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2791 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2792 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2793 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2794 the file name does not look like a page range.
2796 printf has several changes:
2798 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2799 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2801 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2802 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2803 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2805 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2806 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2809 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2810 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2812 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2813 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2815 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2817 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2818 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2820 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2822 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2824 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2825 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2826 when first encountering the directory.
2830 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2831 output; POSIX requires this.
2833 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2834 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2836 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2838 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2839 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2841 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2842 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2844 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2845 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2846 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2847 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2848 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2849 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2850 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2852 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2853 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2854 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2856 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2857 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2859 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2861 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2863 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2864 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2865 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2866 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2868 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2872 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2873 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2874 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2875 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
2876 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
2878 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2879 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2880 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2882 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2883 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2885 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2886 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2888 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2889 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2890 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2891 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2892 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2894 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2895 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2897 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2898 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2900 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2902 nocreat do not create the output file
2903 excl fail if the output file already exists
2904 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2905 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2907 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2909 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2910 direct use direct I/O for data
2911 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2912 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2913 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2914 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2915 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2917 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2919 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2920 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
2923 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2924 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2925 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2926 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2927 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2928 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2930 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2931 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2933 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2936 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2938 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2940 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2941 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2943 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2944 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2945 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2947 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2948 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2949 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2951 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2953 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2954 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2956 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2957 for compatibility with bash.
2959 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2961 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2962 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2963 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2964 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2966 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2967 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2969 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2970 ls supports TABSIZE.
2971 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2972 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2973 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2975 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2978 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2980 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2981 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2982 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2983 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2984 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2985 an offset, not as a file name.
2987 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2988 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2990 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2991 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2993 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2994 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2996 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2997 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2998 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3000 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3001 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3003 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3004 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3008 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3010 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3012 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3016 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3017 or more arguments between partitions.
3019 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3020 holes in the destination.
3022 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3023 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3024 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3025 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3026 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3027 terminates immediately.
3029 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3031 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3033 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3034 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3035 not the empty string.
3037 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3038 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3042 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3043 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3044 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3047 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3054 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3058 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3059 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3061 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3062 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3064 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3065 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3066 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3069 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3073 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3074 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3076 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3077 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3079 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3080 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3081 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3083 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3085 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3088 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3090 ** Configuration option
3092 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3093 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3097 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3098 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3102 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3103 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3104 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3107 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3108 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3109 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3110 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3111 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3112 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3113 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3116 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3120 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3121 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3122 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3124 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3125 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3127 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3129 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3130 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3131 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3132 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3134 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3136 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3137 not just the ones that reference directories
3139 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3140 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3142 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3143 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3144 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3146 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3147 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3148 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3149 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3150 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3151 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3153 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3158 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3159 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3161 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3163 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3165 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3167 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3168 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3170 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3171 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3173 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3175 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3179 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3181 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3183 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3184 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3185 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3186 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3187 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3189 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3190 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3192 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3193 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3195 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3196 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3198 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3199 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3200 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3204 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3205 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3206 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3207 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3208 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3209 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3210 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3211 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3212 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3213 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3214 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3215 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3216 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3217 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3219 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3221 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3222 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3224 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3226 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3228 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3229 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3231 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3233 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3234 without a trailing newline.
3236 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3237 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3239 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3242 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3246 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3248 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3250 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3251 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3252 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3253 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3255 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3257 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3258 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3259 be printed without leading spaces.
3261 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3262 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3267 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3268 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3269 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3271 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3273 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3274 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3276 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3277 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3279 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3280 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3282 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3284 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3286 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3288 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3289 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3291 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3293 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3295 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3296 byte offsets are specified.
3299 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3302 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3305 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3306 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3307 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3308 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3309 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3310 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3311 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3312 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3313 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3314 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3315 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3316 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3317 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3318 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3319 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3320 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3321 directory where M has write access.
3322 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3323 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3324 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3327 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3328 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3329 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3330 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3331 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3332 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3333 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3334 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3335 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3336 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3337 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3338 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3339 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3340 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3341 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3342 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3343 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3344 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3345 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3346 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3347 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3348 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3349 appeared one additional time.
3351 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3352 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3353 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3354 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3357 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3358 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3359 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3360 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3361 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3362 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3363 if there were more than 338.
3365 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3366 - false --help now exits nonzero
3369 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3370 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3371 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3372 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3375 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3376 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3377 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3378 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3379 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3382 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3383 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3384 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3385 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3386 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3387 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3388 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3391 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3392 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3393 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3394 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3395 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3396 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3398 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3399 under certain unusual conditions
3400 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3401 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3404 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3405 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3406 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3407 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3408 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3409 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3410 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3411 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3412 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3413 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3414 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3415 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3416 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3417 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3418 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3419 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3422 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3423 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3426 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3427 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3428 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3429 involving hard-linked directories
3430 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3431 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3432 character-special and block files
3435 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3436 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3437 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3438 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3439 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3440 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3441 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3442 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3443 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3445 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3446 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3447 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3448 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3449 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3450 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3451 specified on the command line.
3452 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3453 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3454 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3455 the first file untouched.
3456 * readlink: new program
3457 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3458 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3459 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3460 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3461 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3462 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3465 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3466 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3467 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3468 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3469 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3470 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3471 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3472 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3473 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3474 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3475 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3476 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3478 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3479 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3480 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3482 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3483 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3484 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3485 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3486 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3487 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3488 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3489 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3492 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3493 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3496 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3497 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3498 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3499 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3500 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3501 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3502 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3505 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3506 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3508 ========================================================================
3509 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3510 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3513 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3515 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3516 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3517 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3518 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3519 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3520 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3521 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3522 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3523 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3524 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3525 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3526 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3528 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3529 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3530 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3531 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3533 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3536 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3538 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3539 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3540 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3541 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3542 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3543 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3544 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3547 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3548 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3549 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3550 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3551 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3552 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3553 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3554 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3555 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3556 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3557 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3558 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3559 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3560 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3561 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3562 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3564 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3565 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3567 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3568 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3569 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3570 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3571 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3572 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3574 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3575 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3576 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3577 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3578 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3579 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3580 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3582 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3583 the source files in the following example:
3584 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3585 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3586 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3587 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3588 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3589 links between source files with --preserve=links
3590 * cp accepts new options:
3591 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3592 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3593 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3594 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3595 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3596 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3597 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3598 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3599 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3601 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3602 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3603 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3604 even though it's older than dest.
3605 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3606 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3607 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3608 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3609 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3611 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3612 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3613 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3614 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3615 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3616 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3617 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3619 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3620 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3621 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3623 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3624 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3625 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3626 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3627 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3628 This is the default.
3630 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3631 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3632 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3633 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3634 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3636 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3639 ========================================================================
3640 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3641 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3644 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3645 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3647 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3648 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3649 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3650 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3651 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3653 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3654 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3655 that specifies a non-directory
3658 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3659 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3660 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3661 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3662 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3663 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3664 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3665 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3666 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3667 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3668 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3669 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3670 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3671 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3672 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3673 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3674 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3675 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3676 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3677 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3678 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3679 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3680 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3681 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3683 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3684 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3685 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3687 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3689 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3690 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3692 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3693 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3694 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3695 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3696 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3698 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3699 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3700 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3701 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3702 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3704 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3706 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3707 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3708 * still more portability fixes
3709 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3710 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3712 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3714 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3716 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3718 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3719 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3720 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3721 there is any time remaining
3722 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3724 ========================================================================
3725 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3726 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3728 This package began as the union of the following:
3729 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3731 ========================================================================
3733 Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3735 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3736 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3737 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3738 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3739 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3740 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.