1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
8 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
9 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
11 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
12 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
13 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
15 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
16 processes will not intersperse their output.
17 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
18 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
20 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
21 call fails with errno == EACCES.
22 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
24 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
25 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
26 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
28 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
29 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
30 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
31 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
32 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
33 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
35 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
36 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
38 ** Changes in behavior
40 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
41 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
42 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
43 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
44 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
48 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
49 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
51 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
52 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
54 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
55 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
58 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
62 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
63 when the source file doesn't have write access.
64 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
66 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
67 to accommodate leap seconds.
68 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
70 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
71 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
72 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
74 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
76 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
77 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
78 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
80 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
81 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
82 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
83 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
84 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
88 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
89 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
90 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
91 directory or a symlink to a directory.
93 ** Changes in behavior
95 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
96 environment variable is set.
98 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
99 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
100 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
104 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
105 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
106 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
107 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
109 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
110 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
111 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
112 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
116 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
117 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
118 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
120 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
121 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
122 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
123 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
124 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
125 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
128 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
129 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
132 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
136 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
137 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
138 and libraries tested at configure time.
139 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
141 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
142 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
144 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
145 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
147 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
148 printing a summary to stderr.
149 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
151 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
152 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
153 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
155 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
156 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
158 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
159 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
160 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
161 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
163 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
164 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
165 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
166 which is relatively unusual.
167 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
169 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
170 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
171 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
172 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
173 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
174 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
175 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
179 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
180 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
181 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
182 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
183 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
187 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
188 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
190 ** Changes in behavior
192 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
193 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
194 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
195 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
196 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
199 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
203 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
204 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
206 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
207 before data copying has started.
209 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
210 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
212 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
213 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
214 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
215 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
217 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
218 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
219 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
220 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
222 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
227 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
228 for its standard streams.
230 ** Changes in behavior
232 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
233 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
234 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
235 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
236 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
237 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
239 ** Deprecated options
241 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
242 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
246 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
248 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
249 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
252 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
254 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
255 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
257 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
258 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
261 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
265 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
266 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
267 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
268 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
270 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
271 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
272 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
273 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
274 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
279 make check: two tests have been corrected
283 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
284 inherited from gnulib.
287 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
291 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
292 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
293 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
294 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
296 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
297 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
299 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
301 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
302 systems without xattr support.
304 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
305 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
306 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
308 ** Changes in behavior
310 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
311 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
312 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
313 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
315 ** Improved robustness
317 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
318 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
319 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
320 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
321 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
322 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
323 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
324 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
325 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
329 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
330 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
332 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
333 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
334 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
335 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
336 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
339 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
343 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
344 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
345 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
349 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
350 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
351 data was read, or on process exit.
352 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
354 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
355 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
356 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
357 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
359 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
360 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
361 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
362 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
364 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
365 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
367 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
368 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
370 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
371 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
372 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
374 ** Changes in behavior
376 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
377 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
378 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
380 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
381 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
383 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
384 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
385 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
388 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
392 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
394 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
395 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
396 install: Never copies xattrs
398 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
399 from overwriting any existing destination file
401 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
402 mode where this feature is available.
404 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
405 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
406 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
407 do not modify the destination at all.
409 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
411 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
415 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
416 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
418 cp uses much less memory in some situations
420 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
421 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
423 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
424 processing the first file name
426 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
427 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
428 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
429 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
431 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
432 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
434 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
435 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
438 ** Changes in behavior
440 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
441 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
443 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
444 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
445 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
447 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
448 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
450 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
452 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
453 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
454 is still marked with a '+'.
457 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
461 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
462 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
466 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
467 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
468 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
469 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
470 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
471 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
473 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
474 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
476 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
477 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
479 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
481 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
482 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
483 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
485 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
486 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
488 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
489 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
490 used to factor large numbers.
492 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
495 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
497 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
499 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
500 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
502 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
503 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
504 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
505 maximum command-line (argv) length.
507 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
508 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
509 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
511 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
512 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
516 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
518 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
519 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
521 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
522 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
524 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
526 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
527 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
531 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
532 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
533 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
535 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
537 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
538 no matter how many files are in a given directory
540 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
541 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
542 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
544 ** Changes in behavior
546 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
547 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
550 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
554 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
556 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
557 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
558 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
560 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
561 with no USERNAME argument.
563 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
564 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
565 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
567 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
568 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
569 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
570 number of fields for some inputs.
572 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
573 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
575 ** Changes in behavior
577 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
578 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
581 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
585 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
587 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
588 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
589 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
590 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
592 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
593 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
595 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
596 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
598 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
599 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
601 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
602 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
603 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
604 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
606 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
607 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
608 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
609 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
610 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
611 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
613 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
614 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
616 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
617 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
618 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
620 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
621 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
623 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
624 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
626 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
627 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
628 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
629 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
631 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
632 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
634 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
635 in more cases when a directory is empty.
637 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
638 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
639 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
643 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
644 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
646 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
647 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
648 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
649 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
653 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
654 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
656 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
658 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
662 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
663 which have negative errno values.
667 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
671 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
675 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
676 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
679 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
683 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
684 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
685 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
687 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
688 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
689 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
690 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
694 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
695 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
696 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
697 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
700 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
704 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
706 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
707 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
708 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
711 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
715 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
716 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
718 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
720 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
722 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
724 ** Programs no longer installed by default
728 ** Changes in behavior
730 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
731 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
733 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
734 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
736 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
737 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
738 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
742 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
743 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
744 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
745 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
746 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
747 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
748 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
749 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
750 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
751 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
752 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
754 The following commands and options now support the standard size
755 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
756 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
759 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
762 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
763 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
764 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
766 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
767 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
768 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
773 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
774 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
775 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
776 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
778 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
779 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
780 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
781 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
782 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
783 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
784 of "make check" fail.
786 ** Remove deprecated options
788 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
789 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
790 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
791 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
792 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
794 ** Improved robustness
796 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
797 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
798 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
799 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
800 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
801 loss of the contents of a/f.
803 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
804 in its 35-colon command-line argument
808 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
809 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
810 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
812 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
813 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
814 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
815 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
817 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
818 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
819 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
820 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
821 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
822 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
823 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
824 destination is a symlink.
826 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
828 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
829 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
831 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
832 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
834 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
836 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
837 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
839 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
840 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
842 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
845 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
846 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
848 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
849 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
851 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
852 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
853 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
854 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
856 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
857 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
858 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
860 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
861 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
862 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
864 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
865 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
866 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
867 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
869 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
870 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
871 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
873 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
874 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
876 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
877 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
879 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
881 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
882 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
883 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
885 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
886 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
888 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
889 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
891 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
892 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
894 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
895 [present in the original version]
898 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
902 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
904 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
905 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
906 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
908 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
909 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
911 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
915 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
916 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
918 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
919 support but with insufficient /proc support.
921 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
922 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
924 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
925 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
926 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
927 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
928 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
929 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
931 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
932 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
935 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
936 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
938 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
941 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
942 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
943 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
945 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
946 directory is unreadable.
948 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
949 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
950 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
952 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
953 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
954 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
955 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
956 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
959 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
960 Before it would print nothing.
962 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
964 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
965 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
966 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
967 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
968 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
969 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
970 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
971 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
973 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
977 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
978 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
979 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
981 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
982 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
983 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
984 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
987 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
991 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
992 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
993 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
994 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
995 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
996 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
997 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
999 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1000 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1001 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1002 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1003 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1004 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1005 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1006 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1008 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1009 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1010 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1013 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1017 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1018 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1020 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1021 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1022 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1024 ** Improved robustness
1026 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1027 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1028 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1031 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1035 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1036 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1037 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1038 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1039 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1041 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1045 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1048 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1052 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1053 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1054 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1055 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1057 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1058 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1060 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1061 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1062 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1065 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1067 ** Improved robustness
1069 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1070 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1072 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1073 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1074 or NFS-mounted partition.
1076 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1077 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1081 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1082 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1083 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1084 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1085 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1086 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1088 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1089 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1091 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1092 or neglect to report file removal.
1094 For the "groups" command:
1096 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1097 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1099 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1101 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1103 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1107 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1108 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1111 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1113 ** Changes in behavior
1115 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1116 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1117 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1118 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1120 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1121 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1122 a final `./' or `../' component.
1124 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1125 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1126 this only for pipes.
1128 ** Infrastructure changes
1130 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1131 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1132 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1133 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1137 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1138 name is "." or "..".
1140 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1141 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1142 dirent.d_type support.
1144 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1145 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1147 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1148 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1149 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1150 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1153 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1155 ** Changes in behavior
1157 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1161 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1162 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1166 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1167 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1168 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1170 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1171 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1173 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1174 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1176 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1178 ** Improved robustness
1180 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1181 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1182 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1184 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1185 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1188 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1189 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1191 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1192 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1194 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1195 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1197 ** Changes in behavior
1199 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1200 where the two are distinct.
1202 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1203 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1204 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1205 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1206 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1207 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1208 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1209 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1210 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1211 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1212 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1213 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1214 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1215 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1216 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1217 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1218 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1220 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1221 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1222 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1224 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1225 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1226 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1227 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1230 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1231 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1235 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1236 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1237 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1238 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1240 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1241 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1242 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1244 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1245 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1246 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1247 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1248 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1251 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1252 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1254 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1255 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1256 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1257 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1259 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1260 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1261 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1263 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1264 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1265 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1266 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1268 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1269 and sticky) with the -m option.
1271 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1272 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1273 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1274 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1275 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1277 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1278 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1280 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1284 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1285 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1286 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1287 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1289 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1291 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1293 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1294 silently ignoring one of them.
1296 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1297 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1298 containing this change was 5.92.
1300 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1301 automatically newline terminated.
1303 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1304 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1305 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1306 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1309 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1310 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1311 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1314 ** Scheduled for removal
1316 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1317 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1319 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1320 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1321 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1322 command to unlink a directory.
1324 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1325 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1326 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1327 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1331 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1332 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1333 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1334 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1335 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1336 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1340 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1341 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1343 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1345 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1346 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1347 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1349 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1350 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1353 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1354 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1356 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1357 list directories before files.
1359 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1360 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1361 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1362 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1365 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1367 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1369 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1370 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1371 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1373 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1374 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1378 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1379 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1380 usually printing nothing.
1382 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1384 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1385 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1386 them with hard-linked directories.
1388 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1389 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1390 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1392 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1393 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1394 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1396 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1399 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1400 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1402 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1403 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1405 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1406 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1408 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1409 all command-line arguments.
1411 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1413 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1415 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1416 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1418 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1420 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1421 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1422 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1423 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1424 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1426 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1427 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1429 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1430 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1431 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1432 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1434 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1436 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1440 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1441 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1443 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1444 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1446 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1447 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1449 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1450 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1452 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1453 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1455 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1457 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1458 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1459 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1462 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1464 ** Build-related bug fixes
1466 installing .mo files would fail
1469 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1473 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1475 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1478 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1482 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1483 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1487 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1489 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1490 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1492 ** Deprecated options
1494 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1495 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1497 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1501 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1503 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1504 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1505 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1506 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1508 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1511 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1517 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1522 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1524 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1526 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1527 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1528 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1530 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1531 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1532 problematic usages. These include:
1534 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1535 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1536 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1537 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1538 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1539 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1540 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1541 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1542 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1544 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1545 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1547 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1548 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1549 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1550 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1552 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1553 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1554 between binary and text files.
1556 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1560 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1564 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1565 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1567 head tac tail tee tr
1568 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1570 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1571 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1573 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1574 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1575 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1577 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1579 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1581 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1582 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1583 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1587 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1589 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1590 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1592 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1593 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1594 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1598 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1599 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1603 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1604 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1605 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1609 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1610 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1614 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1616 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1618 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1622 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1623 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1624 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1626 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1627 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1628 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1629 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1630 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1632 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
1636 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
1637 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
1638 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
1640 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
1642 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
1643 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
1644 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
1645 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
1647 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
1649 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
1650 rather than silently wrapping around.
1652 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
1653 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
1655 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
1656 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
1658 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
1659 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
1660 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
1661 file /tmp/a/b/file".
1663 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
1665 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
1667 ** Improved robustness
1669 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
1670 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
1671 no matter how large the result.
1673 ** Improved portability
1675 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
1676 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
1678 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
1680 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
1681 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
1682 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
1684 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
1685 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
1689 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
1690 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
1692 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
1694 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
1695 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
1696 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
1697 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
1699 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
1700 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
1702 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
1703 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
1704 categories if not specified by dircolors.
1706 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
1708 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
1709 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
1711 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
1712 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
1714 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
1716 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
1717 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
1719 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
1720 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
1722 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
1723 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
1724 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
1726 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
1728 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
1730 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
1734 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
1736 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
1737 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
1738 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
1740 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
1741 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
1743 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
1744 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
1745 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
1747 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
1748 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
1750 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
1751 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
1752 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
1753 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
1755 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
1756 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
1758 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
1759 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
1760 the file system does not support it.
1762 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
1764 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
1765 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
1767 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
1769 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
1770 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
1772 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
1773 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
1774 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
1775 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
1777 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
1778 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
1781 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
1782 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
1783 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
1784 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
1786 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
1787 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
1788 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
1789 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
1791 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
1792 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
1794 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
1796 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
1797 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
1798 reporting incorrect results.
1802 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
1803 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
1805 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
1808 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
1810 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
1811 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
1813 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
1814 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
1816 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
1819 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
1820 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
1821 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
1822 the file name does not look like a page range.
1824 printf has several changes:
1826 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
1827 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
1829 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
1830 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
1831 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
1833 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
1834 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
1837 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
1838 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
1840 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
1841 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
1843 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
1845 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
1846 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
1848 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
1850 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
1852 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
1853 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
1854 when first encountering the directory.
1858 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
1859 output; POSIX requires this.
1861 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
1862 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
1864 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
1866 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
1867 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
1869 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
1870 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
1872 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
1873 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
1874 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
1875 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
1876 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
1877 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
1878 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
1880 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
1881 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
1882 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
1884 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
1885 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
1887 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
1889 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
1891 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
1892 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
1893 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
1894 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
1896 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
1900 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
1901 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
1902 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
1903 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
1904 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
1906 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
1907 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
1908 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
1910 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
1911 is longer than PATH_MAX.
1913 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
1914 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
1916 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
1917 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
1918 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
1919 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
1920 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
1922 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
1923 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
1925 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
1926 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
1928 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
1930 nocreat do not create the output file
1931 excl fail if the output file already exists
1932 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
1933 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
1935 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
1937 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
1938 direct use direct I/O for data
1939 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
1940 sync likewise, but also for metadata
1941 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
1942 nofollow do not follow symlinks
1943 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
1945 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
1947 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
1948 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
1951 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
1952 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
1953 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
1954 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
1955 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
1956 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
1958 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1959 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1961 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
1964 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
1966 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
1968 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
1969 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
1971 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
1972 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
1973 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
1975 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
1976 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
1977 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
1979 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
1981 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
1982 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
1984 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
1985 for compatibility with bash.
1987 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
1989 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
1990 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
1991 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
1992 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
1994 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
1995 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
1997 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
1998 ls supports TABSIZE.
1999 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2000 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2001 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2003 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2006 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2008 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2009 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2010 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2011 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2012 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2013 an offset, not as a file name.
2015 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2016 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2018 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2019 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2021 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2022 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2024 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2025 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2026 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2028 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2029 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2031 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2032 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2036 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2038 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2040 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2044 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2045 or more arguments between partitions.
2047 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2048 holes in the destination.
2050 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2051 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2052 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2053 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2054 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2055 terminates immediately.
2057 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2059 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2061 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2062 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2063 not the empty string.
2065 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2066 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2070 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2071 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2072 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2075 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2082 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2086 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2087 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2089 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2090 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2092 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2093 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2094 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2097 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2101 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2102 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2104 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2105 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2107 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2108 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2109 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2111 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2113 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2116 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2118 ** Configuration option
2120 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2121 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2125 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2126 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2130 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2131 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2132 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2135 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2136 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2137 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2138 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2139 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2140 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2141 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2144 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2148 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2149 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2150 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2152 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2153 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2155 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2157 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2158 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2159 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2160 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2162 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2164 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2165 not just the ones that reference directories
2167 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2168 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2170 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2171 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2172 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2174 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2175 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2176 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2177 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2178 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2179 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2181 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2186 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2187 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2189 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2191 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2193 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2195 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2196 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2198 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2199 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2201 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2203 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2207 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2209 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2211 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2212 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2213 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2214 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2215 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2217 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2218 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2220 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2221 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2223 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2224 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2226 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2227 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2228 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2232 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2233 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2234 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2235 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2236 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2237 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2238 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2239 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2240 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2241 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2242 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2243 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2244 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2245 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2247 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2249 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2250 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2252 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2254 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2256 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2257 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2259 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2261 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2262 without a trailing newline.
2264 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2265 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2267 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2270 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2274 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2276 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2278 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2279 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2280 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2281 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2283 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2285 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2286 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2287 be printed without leading spaces.
2289 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2290 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2295 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2296 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2297 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2299 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2301 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2302 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2304 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2305 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2307 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2308 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2310 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2312 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2314 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2316 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2317 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2319 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2321 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2323 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2324 byte offsets are specified.
2327 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2330 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2333 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2334 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2335 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2336 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2337 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2338 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2339 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2340 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2341 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2342 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2343 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2344 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2345 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2346 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2347 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2348 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2349 directory where M has write access.
2350 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2351 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2352 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2355 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2356 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2357 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2358 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2359 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2360 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2361 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2362 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2363 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2364 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2365 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2366 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2367 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2368 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2369 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2370 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2371 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2372 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2373 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2374 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2375 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2376 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2377 appeared one additional time.
2379 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2380 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2381 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2382 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2385 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2386 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2387 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2388 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2389 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2390 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2391 if there were more than 338.
2393 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2394 - false --help now exits nonzero
2397 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2398 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2399 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2400 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2403 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2404 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2405 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2406 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2407 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2410 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2411 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2412 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2413 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2414 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2415 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2416 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2419 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2420 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2421 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2422 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2423 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2424 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2426 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2427 under certain unusual conditions
2428 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2429 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2432 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2433 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2434 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2435 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2436 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2437 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2438 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2439 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2440 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2441 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2442 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2443 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2444 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2445 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2446 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2447 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2450 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2451 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2454 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2455 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2456 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2457 involving hard-linked directories
2458 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2459 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2460 character-special and block files
2463 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2464 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2465 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2466 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2467 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2468 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2469 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2470 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2471 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2473 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2474 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2475 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2476 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2477 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2478 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2479 specified on the command line.
2480 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2481 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2482 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2483 the first file untouched.
2484 * readlink: new program
2485 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2486 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2487 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2488 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2489 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2490 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2493 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2494 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2495 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2496 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2497 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2498 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2499 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2500 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2501 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2502 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2503 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2504 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2506 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2507 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2508 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2510 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2511 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2512 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2513 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2514 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2515 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2516 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2517 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2520 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2521 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2524 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2525 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2526 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2527 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2528 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2529 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2530 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2533 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2534 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2536 ========================================================================
2537 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2538 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2541 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2543 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2544 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2545 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2546 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2547 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2548 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2549 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2550 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2551 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2552 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2553 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2554 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2556 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2557 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2558 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2559 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2561 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2564 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2566 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2567 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2568 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2569 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2570 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2571 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2572 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2575 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2576 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2577 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2578 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2579 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2580 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2581 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2582 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2583 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2584 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2585 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2586 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2587 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2588 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2589 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2590 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2592 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2593 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2595 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2596 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2597 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2598 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2599 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2600 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2602 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2603 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2604 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2605 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2606 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2607 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2608 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2610 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2611 the source files in the following example:
2612 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2613 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2614 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2615 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2616 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2617 links between source files with --preserve=links
2618 * cp accepts new options:
2619 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2620 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2621 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2622 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2623 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2624 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2625 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2626 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2627 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2629 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2630 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2631 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2632 even though it's older than dest.
2633 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
2634 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
2635 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
2636 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
2637 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
2639 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
2640 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
2641 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
2642 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
2643 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
2644 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
2645 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
2647 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
2648 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
2649 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
2651 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
2652 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
2653 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
2654 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
2655 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
2656 This is the default.
2658 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
2659 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
2660 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
2661 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
2662 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
2664 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
2667 ========================================================================
2668 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
2669 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2672 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
2673 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
2675 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2676 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
2677 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
2678 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
2679 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
2681 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
2682 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
2683 that specifies a non-directory
2686 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
2687 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
2688 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
2689 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
2690 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2691 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
2692 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
2693 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2694 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
2695 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
2696 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
2697 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
2698 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
2699 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
2700 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
2701 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
2702 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
2703 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
2704 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
2705 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
2706 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
2707 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
2708 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
2709 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
2711 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
2712 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
2713 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
2715 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
2717 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
2718 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
2720 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
2721 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
2722 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
2723 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
2724 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
2726 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
2727 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
2728 required support; from Bruno Haible.
2729 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
2730 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
2732 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
2734 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
2735 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
2736 * still more portability fixes
2737 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
2738 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2740 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
2742 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
2744 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
2746 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
2747 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
2748 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
2749 there is any time remaining
2750 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
2752 ========================================================================
2753 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2754 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
2756 This package began as the union of the following:
2757 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
2759 ========================================================================
2761 Copyright (C) 2001-2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
2763 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
2764 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
2765 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
2766 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
2767 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
2768 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.