1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
8 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
9 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
11 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
12 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
14 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
15 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
17 ** Changes in behavior
19 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
20 when -v or -c specified.
24 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
25 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
26 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
27 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
28 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
29 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
30 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
34 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
35 For example `shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2` no longer exhausts memory.
38 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
42 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
43 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
45 ** Changes in behavior
47 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
48 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
49 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
50 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
51 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
52 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
54 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
55 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
56 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
60 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
63 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
67 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
68 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
69 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
71 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
72 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
73 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
75 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
76 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
77 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
79 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
80 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
82 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
83 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
85 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
86 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
88 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
89 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
93 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
94 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
95 processed portion thereof.
97 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
98 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
100 ** Changes in behavior
102 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
103 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
104 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
106 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
107 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
108 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
110 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
111 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
113 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
114 Use --preserve-context instead.
116 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
119 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
123 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
124 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
125 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
126 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
127 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
129 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
130 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
132 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
133 reject file names invalid for that file system.
135 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
136 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
140 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
141 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
142 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
143 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
144 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
145 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
146 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
147 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
149 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
150 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
151 the same number of fields are output for each line.
153 ** Changes in behavior
155 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
156 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
157 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
160 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
164 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
165 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
166 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
169 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
173 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
174 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
176 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
177 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
179 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
180 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
182 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
183 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
184 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
185 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
187 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
188 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
190 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
191 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
192 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
194 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
196 ** Changes in behavior
198 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
199 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
200 to the number of available processors.
204 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
207 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
211 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
212 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
213 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
214 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
216 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
217 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
218 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
220 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
221 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
223 ** Changes in behavior
225 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
226 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
228 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
229 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
230 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
231 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
232 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
233 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
235 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
236 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
237 the same way as the others.
240 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
244 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
245 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
246 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
248 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
249 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
251 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
252 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
253 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
255 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
256 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
258 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
259 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
261 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
262 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
263 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
265 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
266 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
267 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
268 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
272 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
273 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
275 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
278 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
279 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
281 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
283 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
284 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
285 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
287 ** Changes in behavior
289 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
290 rather than its aliased target.
292 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
293 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
294 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
296 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
297 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
298 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
299 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
300 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
301 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
302 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
303 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
305 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
307 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
309 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
310 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
313 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
314 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
315 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
316 control like taskset for example.
318 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
320 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
321 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
322 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
323 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
324 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
325 includes %C when context information is available.
327 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
328 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
329 rather than a file system attribute.
331 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
332 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
333 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
334 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
336 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
337 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
338 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
340 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
341 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
342 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
345 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
349 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
350 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
352 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
354 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
355 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
357 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
358 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
359 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
360 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
362 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
363 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
364 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
368 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
369 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
371 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
372 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
373 duration after the initial signal was sent.
375 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
376 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
377 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
378 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
379 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
380 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
381 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
382 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
383 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
385 ** Changes in behavior
387 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
388 sequence when it would be a no-op.
390 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
391 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
394 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
398 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
399 of available processors, which may not have been the case
400 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
401 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
405 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
406 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
408 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
409 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
410 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
411 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
413 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
414 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
415 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
418 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
422 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
423 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
424 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
426 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
427 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
428 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
430 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
431 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
433 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
434 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
435 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
436 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
438 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
439 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
440 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
442 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
443 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
444 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
445 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
447 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
448 renamed-aside and then recreated.
449 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
451 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
452 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
453 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
454 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
456 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
457 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
458 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
460 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
461 processes will not intersperse their output.
462 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
465 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
469 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
470 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
472 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
473 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
475 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
476 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
477 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
478 the presence of the empty string argument.
479 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
481 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
482 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
483 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
484 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
486 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
487 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
489 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
490 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
491 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
493 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
494 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
495 and with a malicious user on the same system
496 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
497 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
500 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
504 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
505 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
506 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
508 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
509 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
510 offending directory and all "contents."
512 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
513 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
514 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
516 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
517 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
518 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
520 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
521 processes will not intersperse their output.
522 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
523 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
525 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
526 output the name of the file to stdout.
527 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
529 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
530 call fails with errno == EACCES.
531 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
533 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
534 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
537 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
538 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
539 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
541 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
542 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
543 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
544 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
545 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
546 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
548 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
549 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
550 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
551 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
553 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
554 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
556 ** Changes in behavior
558 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
559 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
560 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
561 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
562 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
564 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
565 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
566 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
567 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
569 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
571 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
572 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
573 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
574 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
575 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
579 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
583 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
584 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
586 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
587 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
589 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
590 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
591 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
593 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
594 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
597 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
601 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
602 when the source file doesn't have write access.
603 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
605 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
606 to accommodate leap seconds.
607 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
609 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
610 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
611 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
613 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
615 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
616 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
617 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
619 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
620 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
621 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
622 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
623 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
627 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
628 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
629 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
630 directory or a symlink to a directory.
632 ** Changes in behavior
634 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
635 environment variable is set.
637 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
638 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
639 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
643 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
644 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
645 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
646 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
648 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
649 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
650 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
651 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
655 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
656 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
657 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
659 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
660 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
661 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
662 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
663 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
664 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
667 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
668 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
671 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
675 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
676 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
677 and libraries tested at configure time.
678 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
680 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
681 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
683 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
684 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
686 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
687 printing a summary to stderr.
688 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
690 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
691 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
692 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
694 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
695 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
697 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
698 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
699 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
700 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
702 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
703 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
704 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
705 which is relatively unusual.
706 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
708 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
709 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
710 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
711 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
712 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
713 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
714 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
718 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
719 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
720 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
721 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
722 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
726 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
727 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
729 ** Changes in behavior
731 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
732 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
733 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
734 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
735 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
738 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
742 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
743 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
745 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
746 before data copying has started.
748 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
749 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
751 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
752 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
753 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
754 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
756 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
757 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
758 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
759 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
761 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
766 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
767 for its standard streams.
769 ** Changes in behavior
771 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
772 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
773 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
774 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
775 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
776 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
778 ** Deprecated options
780 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
781 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
785 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
787 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
788 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
791 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
793 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
794 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
796 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
797 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
800 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
804 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
805 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
806 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
807 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
809 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
810 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
811 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
812 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
813 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
818 make check: two tests have been corrected
822 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
823 inherited from gnulib.
826 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
830 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
831 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
832 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
833 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
835 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
836 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
838 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
840 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
841 systems without xattr support.
843 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
844 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
845 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
847 ** Changes in behavior
849 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
850 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
851 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
852 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
854 ** Improved robustness
856 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
857 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
858 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
859 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
860 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
861 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
862 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
863 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
864 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
868 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
869 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
871 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
872 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
873 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
874 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
875 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
878 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
882 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
883 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
884 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
888 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
889 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
890 data was read, or on process exit.
891 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
893 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
894 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
895 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
896 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
898 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
899 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
900 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
901 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
903 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
904 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
906 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
907 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
909 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
910 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
911 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
913 ** Changes in behavior
915 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
916 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
917 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
919 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
920 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
922 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
923 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
924 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
927 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
931 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
933 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
934 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
935 install: Never copies xattrs
937 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
938 from overwriting any existing destination file
940 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
941 mode where this feature is available.
943 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
944 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
945 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
946 do not modify the destination at all.
948 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
950 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
954 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
955 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
957 cp uses much less memory in some situations
959 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
960 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
962 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
963 processing the first file name
965 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
966 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
967 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
968 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
970 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
971 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
973 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
974 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
977 ** Changes in behavior
979 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
980 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
982 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
983 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
984 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
986 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
987 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
989 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
991 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
992 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
993 is still marked with a '+'.
996 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1000 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1001 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1005 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1006 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1007 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1008 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1009 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1010 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1012 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1013 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1015 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1016 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1018 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1020 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1021 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1022 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1024 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1025 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1027 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1028 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1029 used to factor large numbers.
1031 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1034 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1036 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1038 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1039 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1041 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1042 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1043 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1044 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1046 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1047 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1048 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1050 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1051 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1055 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1057 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1058 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1060 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1061 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1063 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1065 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1066 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1070 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1071 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1072 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1074 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1076 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1077 no matter how many files are in a given directory
1079 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1080 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1081 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1083 ** Changes in behavior
1085 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1086 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1089 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1093 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1095 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1096 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1097 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1099 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1100 with no USERNAME argument.
1102 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1103 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1104 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1106 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1107 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1108 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1109 number of fields for some inputs.
1111 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1112 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1114 ** Changes in behavior
1116 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1117 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1120 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1124 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1126 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1127 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1128 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1129 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1131 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1132 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1134 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1135 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1137 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1138 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1140 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1141 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1142 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1143 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1145 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1146 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1147 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1148 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1149 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1150 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1152 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1153 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1155 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1156 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1157 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1159 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1160 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1162 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1163 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1165 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1166 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1167 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1168 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1170 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1171 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1173 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1174 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1176 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1177 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1178 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1182 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1183 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1185 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1186 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1187 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1188 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1192 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1193 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1195 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1197 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1201 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1202 which have negative errno values.
1206 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1210 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1214 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1215 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1218 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1222 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1223 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1224 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1226 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1227 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1228 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1229 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1233 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1234 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1235 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1236 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1239 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1243 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1245 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1246 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1247 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1250 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1254 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1255 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1257 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1259 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1261 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1263 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1267 ** Changes in behavior
1269 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1270 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1272 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1273 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1275 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1276 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1277 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1281 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1282 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1283 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1284 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1285 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1286 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1287 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1288 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1289 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1290 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1291 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1293 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1294 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1295 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1298 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1301 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1302 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1303 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1305 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1306 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1307 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1310 ** New build options
1312 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1313 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1314 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1315 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1317 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1318 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1319 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1320 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1321 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1322 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1323 of "make check" fail.
1325 ** Remove deprecated options
1327 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1328 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1329 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1330 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1331 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1333 ** Improved robustness
1335 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1336 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1337 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1338 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1339 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1340 loss of the contents of a/f.
1342 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1343 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1347 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1348 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1349 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1351 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1352 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1353 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1354 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1356 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1357 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1358 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1359 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1360 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1361 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1362 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1363 destination is a symlink.
1365 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1367 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1368 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1370 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1371 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1373 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1375 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1376 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1378 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1379 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1381 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1384 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1385 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1387 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1388 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1390 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1391 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1392 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1393 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1395 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1396 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1397 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1399 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1400 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1401 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1403 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1404 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1405 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1406 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1408 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1409 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1410 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1412 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1413 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1415 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1416 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1418 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1420 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1421 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1422 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1424 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1425 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1427 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1428 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1430 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1431 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1433 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1434 [present in the original version]
1437 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1441 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1443 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1444 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1445 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1447 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1448 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1450 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1454 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1455 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1457 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1458 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1460 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1461 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1463 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1464 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1465 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1466 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1467 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1468 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1470 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1471 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1474 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1475 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1477 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1480 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1481 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1482 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1484 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1485 directory is unreadable.
1487 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1488 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1489 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1491 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1492 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1493 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1494 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1495 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1498 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1499 Before it would print nothing.
1501 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1503 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1504 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1505 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1506 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1507 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1508 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1509 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1510 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1512 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1516 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1517 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1518 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1520 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1521 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1522 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1523 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1526 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1530 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1531 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1532 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1533 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1534 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1535 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1536 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1538 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1539 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1540 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1541 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1542 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1543 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1544 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1545 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1547 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1548 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1549 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1552 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1556 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1557 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1559 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1560 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1561 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1563 ** Improved robustness
1565 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1566 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1567 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1570 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1574 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1575 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1576 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1577 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1578 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1580 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1584 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1587 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1591 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1592 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1593 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1594 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1596 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1597 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1599 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1600 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1601 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1604 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1606 ** Improved robustness
1608 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1609 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1611 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1612 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1613 or NFS-mounted partition.
1615 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1616 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1620 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1621 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1622 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1623 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1624 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1625 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1627 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1628 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1630 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1631 or neglect to report file removal.
1633 For the "groups" command:
1635 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1636 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1638 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1640 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1642 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1646 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1647 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1650 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1652 ** Changes in behavior
1654 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1655 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1656 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1657 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1659 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1660 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1661 a final `./' or `../' component.
1663 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1664 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1665 this only for pipes.
1667 ** Infrastructure changes
1669 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1670 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1671 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1672 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1676 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1677 name is "." or "..".
1679 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1680 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1681 dirent.d_type support.
1683 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1684 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1686 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1687 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1688 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1689 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1692 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1694 ** Changes in behavior
1696 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1700 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1701 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1705 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1706 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1707 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1709 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1710 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1712 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1713 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1715 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1717 ** Improved robustness
1719 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1720 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1721 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1723 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1724 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1727 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1728 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1730 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1731 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1733 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1734 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1736 ** Changes in behavior
1738 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1739 where the two are distinct.
1741 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1742 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1743 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1744 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1745 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1746 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1747 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1748 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1749 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1750 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1751 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1752 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1753 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1754 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1755 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1756 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1757 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1759 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1760 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1761 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1763 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1764 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1765 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1766 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1769 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1770 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1774 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1775 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1776 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1777 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1779 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1780 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1781 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1783 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1784 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1785 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1786 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1787 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1790 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1791 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1793 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1794 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1795 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1796 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1798 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1799 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1800 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1802 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1803 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1804 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1805 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1807 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1808 and sticky) with the -m option.
1810 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1811 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1812 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1813 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1814 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1816 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1817 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1819 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1823 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1824 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1825 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1826 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1828 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1830 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1832 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1833 silently ignoring one of them.
1835 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1836 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1837 containing this change was 5.92.
1839 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1840 automatically newline terminated.
1842 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1843 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1844 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1845 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1848 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1849 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1850 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1853 ** Scheduled for removal
1855 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1856 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1858 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1859 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1860 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1861 command to unlink a directory.
1863 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1864 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1865 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1866 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1870 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1871 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1872 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1873 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1874 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1875 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1879 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1880 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1882 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1884 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1885 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1886 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1888 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1889 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1892 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1893 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1895 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1896 list directories before files.
1898 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1899 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1900 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1901 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1904 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1906 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1908 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1909 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1910 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1912 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1913 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1917 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1918 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1919 usually printing nothing.
1921 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1923 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1924 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1925 them with hard-linked directories.
1927 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1928 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1929 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1931 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1932 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1933 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1935 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1938 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1939 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1941 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1942 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1944 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1945 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1947 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1948 all command-line arguments.
1950 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1952 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1954 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1955 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1957 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1959 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1960 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1961 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1962 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1963 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1965 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1966 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1968 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1969 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1970 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1971 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1973 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1975 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1979 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1980 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1982 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1983 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1985 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1986 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1988 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1989 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1991 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1992 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1994 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1996 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1997 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1998 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2001 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2003 ** Build-related bug fixes
2005 installing .mo files would fail
2008 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2012 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2014 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2017 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2021 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2022 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2026 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2028 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2029 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2031 ** Deprecated options
2033 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2034 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
2036 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2040 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2042 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2043 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2044 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2045 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2047 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2050 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2056 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2061 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2063 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2065 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2066 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2067 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2069 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2070 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2071 problematic usages. These include:
2073 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2074 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2075 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2076 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2077 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2078 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2079 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2080 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2081 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2083 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2084 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2086 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2087 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2088 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2089 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2091 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2092 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2093 between binary and text files.
2095 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2099 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2103 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2104 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2106 head tac tail tee tr
2107 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2109 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2110 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2112 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2113 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2114 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2116 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2118 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2120 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2121 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2122 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2126 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2128 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2129 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2131 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2132 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2133 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2137 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2138 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2142 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2143 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2144 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2148 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2149 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2153 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2155 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2157 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2161 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2162 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2163 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2165 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2166 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2167 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2168 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2169 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2171 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2175 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2176 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2177 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2179 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2181 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2182 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2183 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2184 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2186 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2188 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2189 rather than silently wrapping around.
2191 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2192 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2194 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2195 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2197 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2198 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2199 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2200 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2202 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2204 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2206 ** Improved robustness
2208 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2209 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2210 no matter how large the result.
2212 ** Improved portability
2214 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2215 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2217 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2219 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2220 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2221 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2223 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2224 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2228 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2229 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2231 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2233 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2234 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2235 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2236 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2238 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2239 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2241 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2242 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2243 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2245 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2247 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2248 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2250 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2251 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2253 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2255 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2256 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2258 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2259 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2261 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2262 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2263 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2265 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2267 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2269 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2273 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2275 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2276 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2277 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2279 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2280 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2282 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2283 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2284 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2286 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2287 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2289 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2290 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2291 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2292 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2294 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2295 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2297 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2298 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2299 the file system does not support it.
2301 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2303 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2304 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2306 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2308 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2309 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2311 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2312 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2313 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2314 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2316 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2317 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2320 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2321 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2322 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2323 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2325 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2326 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2327 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2328 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2330 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2331 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2333 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2335 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2336 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2337 reporting incorrect results.
2341 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2342 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2344 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2347 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2349 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2350 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2352 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2353 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2355 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2358 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2359 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2360 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2361 the file name does not look like a page range.
2363 printf has several changes:
2365 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2366 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2368 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2369 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2370 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2372 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2373 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2376 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2377 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2379 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2380 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2382 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2384 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2385 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2387 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2389 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2391 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2392 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2393 when first encountering the directory.
2397 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2398 output; POSIX requires this.
2400 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2401 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2403 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2405 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2406 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2408 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2409 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2411 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2412 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2413 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2414 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2415 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2416 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2417 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2419 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2420 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2421 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2423 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2424 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2426 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2428 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2430 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2431 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2432 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2433 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2435 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2439 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2440 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2441 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2442 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2443 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2445 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2446 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2447 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2449 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2450 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2452 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2453 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2455 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2456 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2457 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2458 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2459 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2461 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2462 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2464 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2465 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2467 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2469 nocreat do not create the output file
2470 excl fail if the output file already exists
2471 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2472 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2474 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2476 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2477 direct use direct I/O for data
2478 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2479 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2480 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2481 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2482 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2484 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2486 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2487 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2490 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2491 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2492 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2493 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2494 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2495 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2497 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2498 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2500 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2503 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2505 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2507 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2508 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2510 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2511 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2512 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2514 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2515 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2516 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2518 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2520 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2521 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2523 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2524 for compatibility with bash.
2526 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2528 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2529 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2530 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2531 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2533 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2534 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2536 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2537 ls supports TABSIZE.
2538 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2539 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2540 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2542 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2545 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2547 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2548 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2549 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2550 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2551 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2552 an offset, not as a file name.
2554 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2555 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2557 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2558 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2560 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2561 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2563 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2564 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2565 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2567 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2568 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2570 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2571 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2575 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2577 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2579 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2583 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2584 or more arguments between partitions.
2586 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2587 holes in the destination.
2589 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2590 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2591 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2592 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2593 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2594 terminates immediately.
2596 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2598 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2600 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2601 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2602 not the empty string.
2604 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2605 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2609 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2610 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2611 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2614 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2621 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2625 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2626 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2628 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2629 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2631 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2632 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2633 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2636 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2640 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2641 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2643 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2644 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2646 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2647 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2648 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2650 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2652 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2655 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2657 ** Configuration option
2659 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2660 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2664 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2665 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2669 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2670 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2671 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2674 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2675 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2676 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2677 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2678 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2679 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2680 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2683 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2687 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2688 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2689 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2691 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2692 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2694 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2696 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2697 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2698 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2699 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2701 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2703 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2704 not just the ones that reference directories
2706 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2707 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2709 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2710 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2711 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2713 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2714 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2715 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2716 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2717 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2718 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2720 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2725 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2726 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2728 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2730 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2732 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2734 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2735 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2737 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2738 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2740 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2742 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2746 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2748 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2750 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2751 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2752 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2753 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2754 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2756 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2757 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2759 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2760 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2762 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2763 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2765 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2766 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2767 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2771 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2772 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2773 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2774 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2775 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2776 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2777 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2778 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2779 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2780 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2781 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2782 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2783 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2784 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2786 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2788 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2789 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2791 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2793 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2795 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2796 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2798 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2800 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2801 without a trailing newline.
2803 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2804 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2806 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2809 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2813 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2815 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2817 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2818 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2819 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2820 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2822 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2824 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2825 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2826 be printed without leading spaces.
2828 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2829 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2834 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2835 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2836 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2838 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2840 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2841 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2843 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2844 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2846 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2847 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2849 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2851 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2853 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2855 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2856 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2858 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2860 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2862 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2863 byte offsets are specified.
2866 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2869 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2872 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2873 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2874 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2875 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2876 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2877 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2878 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2879 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2880 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2881 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2882 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2883 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2884 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2885 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2886 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2887 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2888 directory where M has write access.
2889 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2890 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2891 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2894 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2895 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2896 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2897 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2898 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2899 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2900 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2901 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2902 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2903 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2904 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2905 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2906 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2907 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2908 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2909 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2910 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2911 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2912 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2913 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2914 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2915 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2916 appeared one additional time.
2918 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2919 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2920 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2921 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2924 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2925 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2926 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2927 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2928 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2929 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2930 if there were more than 338.
2932 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2933 - false --help now exits nonzero
2936 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2937 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2938 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2939 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2942 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2943 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2944 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2945 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2946 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2949 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2950 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2951 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2952 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2953 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2954 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2955 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2958 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2959 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2960 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2961 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2962 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2963 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2965 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2966 under certain unusual conditions
2967 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2968 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2971 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2972 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2973 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2974 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2975 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2976 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2977 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2978 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2979 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2980 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2981 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2982 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2983 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2984 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2985 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2986 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2989 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2990 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2993 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2994 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2995 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2996 involving hard-linked directories
2997 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2998 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2999 character-special and block files
3002 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3003 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3004 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3005 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3006 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3007 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3008 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3009 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3010 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3012 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
3013 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
3014 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3015 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3016 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3017 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3018 specified on the command line.
3019 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3020 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
3021 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3022 the first file untouched.
3023 * readlink: new program
3024 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3025 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3026 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3027 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3028 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3029 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3032 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3033 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3034 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3035 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3036 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3037 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3038 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3039 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3040 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3041 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3042 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3043 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3045 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3046 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3047 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3049 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3050 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3051 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3052 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3053 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3054 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3055 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3056 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3059 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3060 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3063 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3064 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3065 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3066 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3067 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3068 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3069 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3072 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3073 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3075 ========================================================================
3076 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3077 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3080 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3082 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3083 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3084 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3085 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3086 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3087 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3088 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3089 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3090 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3091 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3092 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3093 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3095 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3096 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3097 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3098 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3100 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3103 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3105 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3106 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3107 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3108 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3109 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3110 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3111 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3114 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3115 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3116 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3117 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3118 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3119 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3120 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3121 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3122 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3123 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3124 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3125 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3126 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3127 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3128 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3129 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3131 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3132 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3134 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3135 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3136 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3137 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3138 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3139 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3141 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3142 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3143 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3144 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3145 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3146 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3147 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3149 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3150 the source files in the following example:
3151 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3152 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3153 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3154 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3155 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3156 links between source files with --preserve=links
3157 * cp accepts new options:
3158 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3159 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3160 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3161 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3162 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3163 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3164 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3165 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3166 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3168 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3169 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3170 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3171 even though it's older than dest.
3172 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3173 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3174 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3175 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3176 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3178 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3179 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3180 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3181 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3182 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3183 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3184 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3186 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3187 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3188 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3190 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3191 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3192 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3193 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3194 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3195 This is the default.
3197 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3198 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3199 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3200 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3201 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3203 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3206 ========================================================================
3207 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3208 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3211 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3212 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3214 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3215 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3216 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3217 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3218 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3220 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3221 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3222 that specifies a non-directory
3225 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3226 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3227 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3228 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3229 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3230 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3231 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3232 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3233 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3234 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3235 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3236 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3237 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3238 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3239 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3240 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3241 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3242 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3243 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3244 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3245 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3246 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3247 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3248 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3250 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3251 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3252 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3254 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3256 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3257 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3259 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3260 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3261 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3262 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3263 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3265 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3266 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3267 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3268 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3269 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3271 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3273 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3274 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3275 * still more portability fixes
3276 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3277 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3279 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3281 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3283 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3285 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3286 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3287 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3288 there is any time remaining
3289 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3291 ========================================================================
3292 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3293 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3295 This package began as the union of the following:
3296 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3298 ========================================================================
3300 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3302 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3303 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3304 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3305 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3306 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3307 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.