1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
8 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
11 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
15 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
16 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
17 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
19 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
20 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
22 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
23 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
27 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
28 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
30 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
31 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
32 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
33 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
35 ** Changes in behavior
37 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
38 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
39 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
43 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
44 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
45 only .tar.xz files is enough.
48 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
52 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
53 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
54 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
56 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
57 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
59 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
60 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
61 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
62 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
63 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
65 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
66 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
67 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
68 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
69 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
70 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
71 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
72 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
74 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
75 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
77 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
78 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
80 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
81 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
83 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
84 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
85 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
87 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
88 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
89 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
90 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
92 ** Changes in behavior
94 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
95 when -v or -c specified.
97 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
98 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
102 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
103 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
104 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
105 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
106 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
108 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
109 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
110 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
112 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
113 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
114 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
115 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
116 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
117 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
118 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
120 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
121 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
122 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
126 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
127 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
129 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
132 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
133 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
135 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
136 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
138 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
139 For example `shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2` no longer exhausts memory.
141 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
143 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
147 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
148 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
150 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
153 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
157 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
158 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
160 ** Changes in behavior
162 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
163 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
164 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
165 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
166 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
167 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
169 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
170 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
171 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
175 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
178 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
182 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
183 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
184 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
186 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
187 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
188 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
190 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
191 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
192 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
194 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
195 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
197 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
198 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
200 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
201 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
203 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
204 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
208 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
209 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
210 processed portion thereof.
212 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
213 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
215 ** Changes in behavior
217 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
218 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
219 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
221 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
222 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
223 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
225 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
226 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
228 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
229 Use --preserve-context instead.
231 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
234 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
238 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
239 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
240 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
241 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
242 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
244 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
245 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
247 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
248 reject file names invalid for that file system.
250 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
251 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
255 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
256 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
257 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
258 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
259 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
260 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
261 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
262 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
264 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
265 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
266 the same number of fields are output for each line.
268 ** Changes in behavior
270 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
271 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
272 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
275 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
279 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
280 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
281 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
284 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
288 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
289 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
291 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
292 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
294 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
295 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
297 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
298 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
299 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
300 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
302 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
303 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
305 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
306 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
307 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
309 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
311 ** Changes in behavior
313 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
314 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
315 to the number of available processors.
319 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
322 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
326 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
327 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
328 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
329 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
331 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
332 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
333 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
335 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
336 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
338 ** Changes in behavior
340 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
341 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
343 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
344 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
345 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
346 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
347 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
348 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
350 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
351 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
352 the same way as the others.
355 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
359 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
360 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
361 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
363 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
364 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
366 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
367 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
368 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
370 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
371 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
373 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
374 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
376 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
377 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
378 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
380 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
381 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
382 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
383 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
387 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
388 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
390 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
393 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
394 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
396 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
398 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
399 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
400 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
402 ** Changes in behavior
404 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
405 rather than its aliased target.
407 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
408 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
409 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
411 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
412 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
413 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
414 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
415 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
416 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
417 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
418 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
420 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
422 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
424 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
425 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
428 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
429 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
430 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
431 control like taskset for example.
433 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
435 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
436 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
437 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
438 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
439 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
440 includes %C when context information is available.
442 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
443 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
444 rather than a file system attribute.
446 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
447 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
448 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
449 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
451 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
452 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
453 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
455 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
456 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
457 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
460 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
464 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
465 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
467 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
469 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
470 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
472 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
473 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
474 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
475 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
477 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
478 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
479 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
483 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
484 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
486 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
487 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
488 duration after the initial signal was sent.
490 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
491 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
492 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
493 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
494 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
495 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
496 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
497 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
498 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
500 ** Changes in behavior
502 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
503 sequence when it would be a no-op.
505 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
506 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
509 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
513 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
514 of available processors, which may not have been the case
515 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
516 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
520 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
521 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
523 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
524 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
525 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
526 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
528 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
529 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
530 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
533 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
537 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
538 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
539 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
541 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
542 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
543 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
545 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
546 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
548 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
549 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
550 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
551 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
553 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
554 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
555 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
557 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
558 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
559 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
560 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
562 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
563 renamed-aside and then recreated.
564 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
566 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
567 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
568 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
569 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
571 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
572 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
573 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
575 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
576 processes will not intersperse their output.
577 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
580 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
584 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
585 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
587 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
588 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
590 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
591 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
592 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
593 the presence of the empty string argument.
594 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
596 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
597 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
598 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
599 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
601 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
602 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
604 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
605 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
606 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
608 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
609 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
610 and with a malicious user on the same system
611 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
612 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
615 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
619 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
620 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
621 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
623 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
624 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
625 offending directory and all "contents."
627 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
628 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
629 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
631 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
632 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
633 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
635 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
636 processes will not intersperse their output.
637 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
638 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
640 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
641 output the name of the file to stdout.
642 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
644 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
645 call fails with errno == EACCES.
646 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
648 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
649 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
652 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
653 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
654 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
656 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
657 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
658 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
659 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
660 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
661 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
663 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
664 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
665 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
666 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
668 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
669 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
671 ** Changes in behavior
673 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
674 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
675 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
676 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
677 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
679 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
680 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
681 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
682 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
684 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
686 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
687 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
688 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
689 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
690 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
694 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
698 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
699 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
701 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
702 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
704 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
705 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
706 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
708 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
709 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
712 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
716 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
717 when the source file doesn't have write access.
718 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
720 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
721 to accommodate leap seconds.
722 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
724 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
725 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
726 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
728 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
730 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
731 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
732 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
734 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
735 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
736 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
737 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
738 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
742 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
743 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
744 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
745 directory or a symlink to a directory.
747 ** Changes in behavior
749 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
750 environment variable is set.
752 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
753 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
754 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
758 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
759 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
760 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
761 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
763 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
764 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
765 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
766 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
770 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
771 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
772 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
774 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
775 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
776 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
777 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
778 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
779 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
782 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
783 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
786 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
790 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
791 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
792 and libraries tested at configure time.
793 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
795 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
796 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
798 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
799 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
801 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
802 printing a summary to stderr.
803 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
805 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
806 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
807 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
809 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
810 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
812 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
813 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
814 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
815 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
817 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
818 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
819 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
820 which is relatively unusual.
821 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
823 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
824 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
825 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
826 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
827 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
828 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
829 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
833 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
834 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
835 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
836 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
837 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
841 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
842 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
844 ** Changes in behavior
846 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
847 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
848 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
849 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
850 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
853 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
857 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
858 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
860 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
861 before data copying has started.
863 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
864 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
866 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
867 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
868 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
869 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
871 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
872 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
873 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
874 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
876 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
881 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
882 for its standard streams.
884 ** Changes in behavior
886 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
887 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
888 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
889 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
890 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
891 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
893 ** Deprecated options
895 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
896 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
900 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
902 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
903 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
906 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
908 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
909 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
911 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
912 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
915 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
919 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
920 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
921 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
922 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
924 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
925 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
926 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
927 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
928 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
933 make check: two tests have been corrected
937 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
938 inherited from gnulib.
941 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
945 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
946 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
947 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
948 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
950 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
951 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
953 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
955 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
956 systems without xattr support.
958 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
959 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
960 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
962 ** Changes in behavior
964 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
965 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
966 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
967 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
969 ** Improved robustness
971 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
972 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
973 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
974 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
975 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
976 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
977 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
978 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
979 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
983 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
984 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
986 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
987 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
988 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
989 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
990 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
993 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
997 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
998 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
999 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1003 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1004 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1005 data was read, or on process exit.
1006 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1008 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1009 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1010 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1011 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1013 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1014 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1015 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1016 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1018 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1019 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1021 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1022 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1024 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1025 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1026 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1028 ** Changes in behavior
1030 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1031 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1032 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1034 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1035 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1037 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1038 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1039 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1042 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1046 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1048 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1049 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1050 install: Never copies xattrs
1052 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1053 from overwriting any existing destination file
1055 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1056 mode where this feature is available.
1058 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1059 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1060 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1061 do not modify the destination at all.
1063 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1065 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1069 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1070 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1072 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1074 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1075 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1077 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1078 processing the first file name
1080 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1081 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1082 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1083 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1085 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1086 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1088 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1089 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1092 ** Changes in behavior
1094 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1095 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1097 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1098 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1099 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1101 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1102 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1104 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1106 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1107 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1108 is still marked with a '+'.
1111 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1115 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1116 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1120 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1121 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1122 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1123 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1124 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1125 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1127 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1128 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1130 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1131 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1133 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1135 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1136 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1137 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1139 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1140 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1142 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1143 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1144 used to factor large numbers.
1146 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1149 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1151 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1153 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1154 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1156 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1157 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1158 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1159 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1161 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1162 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1163 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1165 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1166 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1170 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1172 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1173 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1175 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1176 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1178 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1180 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1181 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1185 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1186 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1187 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1189 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1191 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1192 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1193 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1195 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1196 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1197 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1199 ** Changes in behavior
1201 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1202 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1205 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1209 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1210 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1211 'futimens' system calls.
1215 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1217 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1218 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1219 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1221 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1222 with no USERNAME argument.
1224 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1225 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1226 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1228 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1229 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1230 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1231 number of fields for some inputs.
1233 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1234 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1236 ** Changes in behavior
1238 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1239 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1242 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1246 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1248 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1249 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1250 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1251 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1253 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1254 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1256 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1257 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1259 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1260 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1262 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1263 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1264 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1265 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1267 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1268 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1269 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1270 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1271 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1272 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1274 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1275 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1277 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1278 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1279 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1281 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1282 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1284 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1285 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1287 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1288 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1289 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1290 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1292 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1293 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1295 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1296 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1298 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1299 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1300 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1304 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1305 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1307 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1308 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1309 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1310 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1314 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1315 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1317 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1319 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1323 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1324 which have negative errno values.
1328 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1332 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1336 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1337 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1340 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1344 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1345 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1346 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1348 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1349 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1350 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1351 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1355 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1356 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1357 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1358 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1361 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1365 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1367 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1368 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1369 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1372 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1376 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1377 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1379 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1381 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1383 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1385 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1389 ** Changes in behavior
1391 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1392 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1394 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1395 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1397 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1398 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1399 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1403 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1404 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1405 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1406 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1407 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1408 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1409 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1410 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1411 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1412 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1413 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1415 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1416 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1417 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1420 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1423 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1424 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1425 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1427 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1428 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1429 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1432 ** New build options
1434 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1435 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1436 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1437 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1439 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1440 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1441 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1442 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1443 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1444 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1445 of "make check" fail.
1447 ** Remove deprecated options
1449 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1450 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1451 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1452 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1453 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1455 ** Improved robustness
1457 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1458 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1459 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1460 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1461 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1462 loss of the contents of a/f.
1464 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1465 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1469 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1470 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1471 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1473 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1474 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1475 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1476 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1478 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1479 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1480 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1481 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1482 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1483 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1484 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1485 destination is a symlink.
1487 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1489 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1490 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1492 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1493 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1495 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1497 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1498 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1500 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1501 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1503 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1506 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1507 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1509 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1510 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1512 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1513 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1514 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1515 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1517 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1518 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1519 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1521 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1522 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1523 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1525 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1526 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1527 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1528 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1530 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1531 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1532 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1534 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1535 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1537 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1538 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1540 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1542 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1543 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1544 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1546 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1547 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1549 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1550 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1552 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1553 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1555 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1556 [present in the original version]
1559 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1563 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1565 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1566 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1567 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1569 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1570 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1572 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1576 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1577 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1579 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1580 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1582 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1583 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1585 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1586 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1587 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1588 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1589 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1590 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1592 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1593 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1596 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1597 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1599 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1602 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1603 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1604 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1606 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1607 directory is unreadable.
1609 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1610 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1611 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1613 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1614 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1615 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1616 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1617 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1620 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1621 Before it would print nothing.
1623 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1625 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1626 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1627 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1628 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1629 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1630 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1631 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1632 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1634 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1638 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1639 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1640 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1642 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1643 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1644 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1645 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1648 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1652 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1653 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1654 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1655 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1656 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1657 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1658 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1660 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1661 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1662 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1663 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1664 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1665 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1666 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1667 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1669 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1670 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1671 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1674 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1678 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1679 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1681 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1682 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1683 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1685 ** Improved robustness
1687 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1688 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1689 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1692 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1696 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1697 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1698 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1699 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1700 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1702 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1706 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1709 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1713 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1714 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1715 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1716 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1718 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1719 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1721 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1722 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1723 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1726 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1728 ** Improved robustness
1730 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1731 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1733 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1734 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1735 or NFS-mounted partition.
1737 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1738 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1742 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1743 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1744 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1745 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1746 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1747 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1749 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1750 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1752 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1753 or neglect to report file removal.
1755 For the "groups" command:
1757 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1758 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1760 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1762 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1764 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1768 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1769 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1772 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1774 ** Changes in behavior
1776 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1777 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1778 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1779 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1781 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1782 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1783 a final `./' or `../' component.
1785 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1786 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1787 this only for pipes.
1789 ** Infrastructure changes
1791 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1792 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1793 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1794 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1798 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1799 name is "." or "..".
1801 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1802 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1803 dirent.d_type support.
1805 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1806 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1808 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1809 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1810 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1811 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1814 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1816 ** Changes in behavior
1818 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1822 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1823 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1827 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1828 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1829 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1831 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1832 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1834 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1835 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1837 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1839 ** Improved robustness
1841 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1842 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1843 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1845 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1846 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1849 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1850 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1852 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1853 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1855 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1856 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1858 ** Changes in behavior
1860 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1861 where the two are distinct.
1863 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1864 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1865 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1866 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1867 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1868 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1869 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1870 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1871 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1872 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1873 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1874 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1875 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1876 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1877 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1878 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1879 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1881 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1882 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1883 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1885 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1886 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1887 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1888 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1891 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1892 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1896 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1897 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1898 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1899 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1901 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1902 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1903 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1905 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1906 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1907 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1908 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1909 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1912 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1913 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1915 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1916 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1917 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1918 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1920 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1921 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1922 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1924 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1925 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1926 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1927 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1929 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1930 and sticky) with the -m option.
1932 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1933 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1934 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1935 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1936 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1938 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1939 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1941 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1945 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1946 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1947 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1948 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1950 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1952 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1954 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1955 silently ignoring one of them.
1957 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1958 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1959 containing this change was 5.92.
1961 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1962 automatically newline terminated.
1964 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1965 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1966 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1967 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1970 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1971 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1972 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1975 ** Scheduled for removal
1977 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1978 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1980 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1981 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1982 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1983 command to unlink a directory.
1985 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1986 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1987 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1988 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1992 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1993 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1994 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1995 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1996 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1997 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2001 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2002 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2004 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2006 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2007 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2008 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2010 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2011 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2014 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2015 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2017 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2018 list directories before files.
2020 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2021 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2022 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2023 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2026 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2028 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
2030 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2031 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2032 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2034 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2035 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2039 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2040 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2041 usually printing nothing.
2043 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2045 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2046 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2047 them with hard-linked directories.
2049 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2050 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2051 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2053 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2054 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2055 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2057 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2060 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2061 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2063 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2064 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2066 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2067 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2069 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2070 all command-line arguments.
2072 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2074 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2076 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2077 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2079 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2081 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2082 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2083 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2084 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2085 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2087 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2088 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2090 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2091 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2092 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2093 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2095 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2097 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2101 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2102 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2104 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2105 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2107 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
2108 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2110 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2111 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
2113 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2114 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2116 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2118 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2119 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2120 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2123 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2125 ** Build-related bug fixes
2127 installing .mo files would fail
2130 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2134 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2136 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2139 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2143 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2144 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2148 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2150 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2151 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2153 ** Deprecated options
2155 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2156 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
2158 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2162 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2164 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2165 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2166 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2167 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2169 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2172 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2178 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2183 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2185 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2187 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2188 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2189 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2191 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2192 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2193 problematic usages. These include:
2195 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2196 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2197 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2198 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2199 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2200 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2201 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2202 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2203 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2205 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2206 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2208 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2209 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2210 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2211 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2213 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2214 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2215 between binary and text files.
2217 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2221 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2225 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2226 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2228 head tac tail tee tr
2229 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2231 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2232 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2234 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2235 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2236 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2238 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2240 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2242 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2243 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2244 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2248 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2250 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2251 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2253 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2254 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2255 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2259 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2260 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2264 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2265 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2266 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2270 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2271 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2275 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2277 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2279 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2283 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2284 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2285 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2287 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2288 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2289 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2290 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2291 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2293 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2297 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2298 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2299 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2301 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2303 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2304 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2305 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2306 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2308 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2310 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2311 rather than silently wrapping around.
2313 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2314 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2316 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2317 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2319 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2320 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2321 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2322 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2324 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2326 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2328 ** Improved robustness
2330 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2331 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2332 no matter how large the result.
2334 ** Improved portability
2336 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2337 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2339 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2341 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2342 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2343 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2345 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2346 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2350 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2351 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2353 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2355 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2356 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2357 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2358 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2360 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2361 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2363 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2364 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2365 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2367 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2369 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2370 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2372 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2373 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2375 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2377 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2378 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2380 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2381 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2383 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2384 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2385 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2387 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2389 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2391 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2395 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2397 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2398 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2399 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2401 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2402 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2404 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2405 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2406 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2408 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2409 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2411 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2412 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2413 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2414 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2416 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2417 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2419 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2420 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2421 the file system does not support it.
2423 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2425 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2426 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2428 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2430 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2431 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2433 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2434 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2435 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2436 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2438 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2439 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2442 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2443 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2444 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2445 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2447 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2448 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2449 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2450 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2452 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2453 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2455 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2457 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2458 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2459 reporting incorrect results.
2463 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2464 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2466 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2469 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2471 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2472 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2474 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2475 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2477 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2480 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2481 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2482 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2483 the file name does not look like a page range.
2485 printf has several changes:
2487 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2488 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2490 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2491 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2492 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2494 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2495 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2498 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2499 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2501 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2502 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2504 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2506 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2507 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2509 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2511 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2513 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2514 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2515 when first encountering the directory.
2519 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2520 output; POSIX requires this.
2522 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2523 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2525 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2527 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2528 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2530 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2531 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2533 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2534 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2535 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2536 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2537 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2538 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2539 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2541 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2542 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2543 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2545 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2546 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2548 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2550 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2552 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2553 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2554 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2555 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2557 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2561 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2562 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2563 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2564 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2565 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2567 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2568 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2569 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2571 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2572 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2574 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2575 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2577 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2578 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2579 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2580 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2581 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2583 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2584 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2586 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2587 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2589 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2591 nocreat do not create the output file
2592 excl fail if the output file already exists
2593 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2594 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2596 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2598 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2599 direct use direct I/O for data
2600 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2601 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2602 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2603 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2604 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2606 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2608 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2609 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2612 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2613 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2614 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2615 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2616 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2617 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2619 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2620 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2622 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2625 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2627 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2629 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2630 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2632 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2633 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2634 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2636 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2637 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2638 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2640 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2642 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2643 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2645 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2646 for compatibility with bash.
2648 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2650 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2651 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2652 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2653 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2655 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2656 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2658 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2659 ls supports TABSIZE.
2660 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2661 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2662 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2664 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2667 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2669 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2670 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2671 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2672 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2673 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2674 an offset, not as a file name.
2676 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2677 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2679 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2680 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2682 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2683 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2685 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2686 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2687 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2689 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2690 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2692 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2693 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2697 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2699 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2701 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2705 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2706 or more arguments between partitions.
2708 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2709 holes in the destination.
2711 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2712 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2713 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2714 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2715 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2716 terminates immediately.
2718 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2720 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2722 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2723 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2724 not the empty string.
2726 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2727 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2731 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2732 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2733 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2736 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2743 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2747 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2748 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2750 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2751 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2753 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2754 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2755 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2758 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2762 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2763 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2765 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2766 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2768 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2769 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2770 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2772 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2774 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2777 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2779 ** Configuration option
2781 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2782 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2786 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2787 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2791 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2792 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2793 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2796 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2797 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2798 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2799 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2800 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2801 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2802 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2805 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2809 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2810 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2811 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2813 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2814 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2816 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2818 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2819 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2820 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2821 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2823 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2825 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2826 not just the ones that reference directories
2828 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2829 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2831 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2832 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2833 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2835 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2836 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2837 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2838 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2839 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2840 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2842 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2847 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2848 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2850 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2852 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2854 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2856 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2857 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2859 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2860 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2862 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2864 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2868 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2870 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2872 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2873 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2874 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2875 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2876 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2878 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2879 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2881 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2882 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2884 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2885 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2887 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2888 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2889 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2893 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2894 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2895 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2896 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2897 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2898 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2899 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2900 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2901 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2902 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2903 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2904 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2905 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2906 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2908 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2910 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2911 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2913 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2915 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2917 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2918 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2920 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2922 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2923 without a trailing newline.
2925 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2926 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2928 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2931 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2935 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2937 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2939 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2940 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2941 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2942 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2944 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2946 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2947 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2948 be printed without leading spaces.
2950 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2951 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2956 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2957 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2958 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2960 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2962 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2963 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2965 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2966 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2968 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2969 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2971 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2973 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2975 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2977 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2978 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2980 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2982 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2984 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2985 byte offsets are specified.
2988 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2991 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2994 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2995 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2996 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2997 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2998 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2999 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3000 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3001 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
3002 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3003 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3004 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3005 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3006 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3007 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3008 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3009 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3010 directory where M has write access.
3011 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3012 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3013 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3016 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3017 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
3018 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3019 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3020 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3021 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
3022 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3023 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3024 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3025 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3026 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3027 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3028 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3029 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3030 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3031 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3032 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3033 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3034 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
3035 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3036 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3037 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3038 appeared one additional time.
3040 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3041 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3042 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3043 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3046 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
3047 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3048 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3049 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3050 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3051 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3052 if there were more than 338.
3054 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3055 - false --help now exits nonzero
3058 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3059 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3060 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3061 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3064 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3065 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
3066 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
3067 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3068 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3071 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3072 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3073 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3074 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
3075 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3076 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3077 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3080 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3081 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3082 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3083 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3084 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3085 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3087 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3088 under certain unusual conditions
3089 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3090 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3093 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3094 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3095 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3096 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3097 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3098 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
3099 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3100 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3101 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
3102 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
3103 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3104 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3105 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3106 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3107 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3108 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3111 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3112 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3115 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3116 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3117 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3118 involving hard-linked directories
3119 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3120 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
3121 character-special and block files
3124 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3125 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3126 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3127 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3128 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3129 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3130 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3131 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3132 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3134 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
3135 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
3136 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3137 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3138 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3139 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3140 specified on the command line.
3141 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3142 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
3143 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3144 the first file untouched.
3145 * readlink: new program
3146 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3147 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3148 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3149 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3150 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3151 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3154 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3155 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3156 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3157 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3158 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3159 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3160 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3161 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3162 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3163 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3164 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3165 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3167 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3168 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3169 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3171 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3172 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3173 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3174 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3175 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3176 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3177 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3178 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3181 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3182 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3185 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3186 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3187 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3188 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3189 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3190 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3191 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3194 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3195 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3197 ========================================================================
3198 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3199 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3202 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3204 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3205 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3206 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3207 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3208 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3209 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3210 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3211 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3212 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3213 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3214 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3215 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3217 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3218 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3219 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3220 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3222 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3225 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3227 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3228 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3229 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3230 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3231 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3232 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3233 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3236 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3237 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3238 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3239 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3240 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3241 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3242 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3243 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3244 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3245 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3246 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3247 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3248 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3249 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3250 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3251 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3253 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3254 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3256 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3257 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3258 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3259 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3260 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3261 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3263 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3264 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3265 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3266 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3267 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3268 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3269 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3271 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3272 the source files in the following example:
3273 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3274 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3275 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3276 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3277 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3278 links between source files with --preserve=links
3279 * cp accepts new options:
3280 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3281 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3282 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3283 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3284 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3285 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3286 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3287 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3288 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3290 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3291 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3292 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3293 even though it's older than dest.
3294 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3295 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3296 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3297 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3298 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3300 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3301 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3302 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3303 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3304 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3305 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3306 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3308 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3309 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3310 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3312 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3313 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3314 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3315 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3316 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3317 This is the default.
3319 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3320 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3321 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3322 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3323 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3325 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3328 ========================================================================
3329 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3330 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3333 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3334 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3336 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3337 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3338 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3339 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3340 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3342 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3343 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3344 that specifies a non-directory
3347 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3348 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3349 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3350 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3351 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3352 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3353 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3354 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3355 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3356 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3357 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3358 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3359 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3360 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3361 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3362 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3363 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3364 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3365 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3366 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3367 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3368 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3369 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3370 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3372 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3373 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3374 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3376 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3378 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3379 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3381 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3382 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3383 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3384 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3385 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3387 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3388 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3389 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3390 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3391 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3393 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3395 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3396 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3397 * still more portability fixes
3398 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3399 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3401 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3403 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3405 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3407 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3408 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3409 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3410 there is any time remaining
3411 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3413 ========================================================================
3414 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3415 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3417 This package began as the union of the following:
3418 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3420 ========================================================================
3422 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3424 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3425 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3426 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3427 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3428 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3429 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.