1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
11 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
12 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
14 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
15 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
16 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. Also affected due to their use
17 of canonicalize_* functions: df, stat, readlink.
19 ** Changes in behavior
21 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
22 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
23 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
26 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
30 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
31 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
32 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
34 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
35 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
37 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
38 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
39 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
40 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
41 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
43 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
44 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
45 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
46 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
47 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
48 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
49 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
50 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
52 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
53 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
55 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
56 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
58 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
59 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
61 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
62 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
63 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
65 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
66 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
67 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
68 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
70 ** Changes in behavior
72 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
73 when -v or -c specified.
75 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
76 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
80 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
81 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
82 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
83 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
84 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
86 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
87 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
88 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
90 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
91 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
92 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
93 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
94 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
95 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
96 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
98 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
99 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
100 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
104 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
105 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
107 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
110 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
111 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
113 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
114 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
116 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
117 For example `shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2` no longer exhausts memory.
119 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
121 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
125 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
126 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
128 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
131 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
135 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
136 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
138 ** Changes in behavior
140 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
141 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
142 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
143 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
144 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
145 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
147 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
148 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
149 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
153 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
156 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
160 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
161 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
162 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
164 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
165 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
166 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
168 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
169 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
170 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
172 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
173 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
175 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
176 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
178 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
179 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
181 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
182 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
186 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
187 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
188 processed portion thereof.
190 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
191 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
193 ** Changes in behavior
195 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
196 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
197 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
199 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
200 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
201 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
203 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
204 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
206 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
207 Use --preserve-context instead.
209 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
212 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
216 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
217 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
218 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
219 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
220 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
222 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
223 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
225 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
226 reject file names invalid for that file system.
228 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
229 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
233 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
234 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
235 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
236 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
237 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
238 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
239 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
240 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
242 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
243 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
244 the same number of fields are output for each line.
246 ** Changes in behavior
248 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
249 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
250 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
253 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
257 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
258 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
259 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
262 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
266 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
267 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
269 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
270 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
272 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
273 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
275 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
276 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
277 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
278 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
280 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
281 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
283 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
284 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
285 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
287 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
289 ** Changes in behavior
291 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
292 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
293 to the number of available processors.
297 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
300 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
304 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
305 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
306 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
307 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
309 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
310 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
311 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
313 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
314 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
316 ** Changes in behavior
318 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
319 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
321 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
322 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
323 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
324 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
325 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
326 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
328 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
329 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
330 the same way as the others.
333 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
337 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
338 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
339 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
341 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
342 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
344 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
345 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
346 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
348 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
349 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
351 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
352 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
354 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
355 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
356 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
358 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
359 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
360 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
361 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
365 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
366 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
368 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
371 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
372 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
374 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
376 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
377 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
378 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
380 ** Changes in behavior
382 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
383 rather than its aliased target.
385 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
386 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
387 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
389 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
390 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
391 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
392 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
393 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
394 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
395 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
396 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
398 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
400 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
402 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
403 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
406 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
407 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
408 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
409 control like taskset for example.
411 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
413 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
414 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
415 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
416 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
417 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
418 includes %C when context information is available.
420 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
421 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
422 rather than a file system attribute.
424 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
425 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
426 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
427 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
429 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
430 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
431 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
433 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
434 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
435 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
438 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
442 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
443 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
445 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
447 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
448 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
450 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
451 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
452 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
453 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
455 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
456 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
457 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
461 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
462 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
464 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
465 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
466 duration after the initial signal was sent.
468 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
469 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
470 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
471 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
472 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
473 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
474 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
475 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
476 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
478 ** Changes in behavior
480 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
481 sequence when it would be a no-op.
483 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
484 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
487 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
491 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
492 of available processors, which may not have been the case
493 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
494 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
498 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
499 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
501 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
502 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
503 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
504 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
506 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
507 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
508 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
511 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
515 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
516 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
517 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
519 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
520 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
521 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
523 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
524 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
526 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
527 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
528 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
529 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
531 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
532 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
533 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
535 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
536 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
537 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
538 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
540 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
541 renamed-aside and then recreated.
542 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
544 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
545 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
546 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
547 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
549 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
550 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
551 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
553 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
554 processes will not intersperse their output.
555 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
558 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
562 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
563 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
565 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
566 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
568 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
569 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
570 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
571 the presence of the empty string argument.
572 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
574 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
575 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
576 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
577 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
579 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
580 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
582 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
583 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
584 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
586 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
587 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
588 and with a malicious user on the same system
589 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
590 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
593 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
597 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
598 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
599 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
601 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
602 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
603 offending directory and all "contents."
605 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
606 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
607 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
609 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
610 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
611 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
613 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
614 processes will not intersperse their output.
615 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
616 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
618 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
619 output the name of the file to stdout.
620 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
622 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
623 call fails with errno == EACCES.
624 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
626 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
627 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
630 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
631 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
632 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
634 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
635 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
636 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
637 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
638 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
639 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
641 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
642 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
643 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
644 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
646 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
647 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
649 ** Changes in behavior
651 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
652 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
653 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
654 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
655 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
657 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
658 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
659 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
660 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
662 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
664 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
665 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
666 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
667 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
668 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
672 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
676 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
677 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
679 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
680 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
682 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
683 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
684 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
686 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
687 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
690 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
694 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
695 when the source file doesn't have write access.
696 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
698 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
699 to accommodate leap seconds.
700 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
702 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
703 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
704 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
706 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
708 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
709 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
710 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
712 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
713 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
714 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
715 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
716 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
720 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
721 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
722 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
723 directory or a symlink to a directory.
725 ** Changes in behavior
727 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
728 environment variable is set.
730 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
731 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
732 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
736 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
737 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
738 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
739 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
741 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
742 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
743 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
744 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
748 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
749 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
750 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
752 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
753 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
754 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
755 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
756 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
757 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
760 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
761 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
764 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
768 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
769 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
770 and libraries tested at configure time.
771 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
773 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
774 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
776 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
777 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
779 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
780 printing a summary to stderr.
781 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
783 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
784 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
785 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
787 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
788 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
790 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
791 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
792 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
793 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
795 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
796 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
797 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
798 which is relatively unusual.
799 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
801 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
802 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
803 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
804 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
805 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
806 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
807 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
811 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
812 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
813 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
814 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
815 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
819 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
820 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
822 ** Changes in behavior
824 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
825 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
826 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
827 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
828 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
831 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
835 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
836 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
838 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
839 before data copying has started.
841 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
842 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
844 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
845 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
846 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
847 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
849 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
850 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
851 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
852 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
854 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
859 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
860 for its standard streams.
862 ** Changes in behavior
864 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
865 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
866 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
867 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
868 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
869 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
871 ** Deprecated options
873 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
874 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
878 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
880 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
881 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
884 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
886 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
887 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
889 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
890 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
893 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
897 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
898 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
899 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
900 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
902 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
903 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
904 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
905 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
906 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
911 make check: two tests have been corrected
915 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
916 inherited from gnulib.
919 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
923 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
924 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
925 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
926 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
928 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
929 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
931 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
933 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
934 systems without xattr support.
936 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
937 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
938 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
940 ** Changes in behavior
942 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
943 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
944 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
945 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
947 ** Improved robustness
949 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
950 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
951 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
952 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
953 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
954 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
955 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
956 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
957 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
961 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
962 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
964 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
965 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
966 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
967 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
968 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
971 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
975 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
976 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
977 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
981 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
982 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
983 data was read, or on process exit.
984 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
986 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
987 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
988 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
989 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
991 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
992 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
993 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
994 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
996 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
997 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
999 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1000 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1002 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1003 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1004 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1006 ** Changes in behavior
1008 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1009 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1010 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1012 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1013 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1015 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1016 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1017 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1020 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1024 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1026 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1027 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1028 install: Never copies xattrs
1030 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1031 from overwriting any existing destination file
1033 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1034 mode where this feature is available.
1036 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1037 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1038 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1039 do not modify the destination at all.
1041 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1043 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1047 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1048 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1050 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1052 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1053 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1055 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1056 processing the first file name
1058 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1059 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1060 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1061 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1063 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1064 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1066 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1067 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1070 ** Changes in behavior
1072 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1073 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1075 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1076 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1077 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1079 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1080 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1082 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1084 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1085 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1086 is still marked with a '+'.
1089 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1093 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1094 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1098 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1099 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1100 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1101 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1102 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1103 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1105 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1106 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1108 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1109 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1111 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1113 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1114 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1115 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1117 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1118 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1120 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1121 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1122 used to factor large numbers.
1124 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1127 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1129 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1131 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1132 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1134 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1135 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1136 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1137 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1139 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1140 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1141 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1143 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1144 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1148 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1150 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1151 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1153 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1154 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1156 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1158 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1159 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1163 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1164 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1165 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1167 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1169 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1170 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1171 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1173 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1174 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1175 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1177 ** Changes in behavior
1179 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1180 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1183 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1187 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1188 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1189 'futimens' system calls.
1193 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1195 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1196 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1197 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1199 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1200 with no USERNAME argument.
1202 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1203 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1204 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1206 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1207 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1208 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1209 number of fields for some inputs.
1211 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1212 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1214 ** Changes in behavior
1216 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1217 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1220 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1224 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1226 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1227 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1228 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1229 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1231 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1232 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1234 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1235 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1237 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1238 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1240 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1241 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1242 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1243 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1245 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1246 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1247 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1248 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1249 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1250 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1252 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1253 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1255 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1256 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1257 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1259 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1260 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1262 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1263 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1265 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1266 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1267 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1268 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1270 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1271 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1273 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1274 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1276 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1277 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1278 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1282 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1283 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1285 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1286 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1287 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1288 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1292 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1293 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1295 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1297 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1301 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1302 which have negative errno values.
1306 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1310 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1314 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1315 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1318 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1322 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1323 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1324 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1326 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1327 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1328 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1329 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1333 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1334 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1335 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1336 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1339 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1343 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1345 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1346 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1347 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1350 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1354 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1355 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1357 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1359 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1361 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1363 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1367 ** Changes in behavior
1369 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1370 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1372 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1373 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1375 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1376 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1377 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1381 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1382 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1383 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1384 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1385 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1386 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1387 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1388 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1389 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1390 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1391 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1393 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1394 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1395 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1398 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1401 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1402 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1403 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1405 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1406 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1407 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1410 ** New build options
1412 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1413 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1414 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1415 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1417 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1418 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1419 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1420 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1421 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1422 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1423 of "make check" fail.
1425 ** Remove deprecated options
1427 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1428 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1429 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1430 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1431 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1433 ** Improved robustness
1435 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1436 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1437 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1438 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1439 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1440 loss of the contents of a/f.
1442 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1443 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1447 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1448 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1449 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1451 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1452 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1453 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1454 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1456 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1457 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1458 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1459 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1460 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1461 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1462 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1463 destination is a symlink.
1465 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1467 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1468 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1470 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1471 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1473 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1475 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1476 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1478 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1479 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1481 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1484 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1485 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1487 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1488 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1490 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1491 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1492 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1493 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1495 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1496 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1497 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1499 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1500 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1501 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1503 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1504 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1505 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1506 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1508 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1509 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1510 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1512 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1513 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1515 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1516 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1518 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1520 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1521 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1522 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1524 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1525 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1527 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1528 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1530 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1531 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1533 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1534 [present in the original version]
1537 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1541 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1543 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1544 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1545 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1547 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1548 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1550 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1554 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1555 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1557 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1558 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1560 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1561 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1563 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1564 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1565 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1566 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1567 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1568 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1570 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1571 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1574 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1575 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1577 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1580 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1581 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1582 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1584 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1585 directory is unreadable.
1587 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1588 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1589 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1591 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1592 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1593 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1594 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1595 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1598 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1599 Before it would print nothing.
1601 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1603 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1604 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1605 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1606 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1607 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1608 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1609 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1610 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1612 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1616 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1617 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1618 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1620 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1621 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1622 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1623 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1626 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1630 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1631 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1632 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1633 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1634 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1635 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1636 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1638 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1639 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1640 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1641 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1642 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1643 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1644 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1645 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1647 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1648 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1649 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1652 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1656 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1657 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1659 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1660 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1661 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1663 ** Improved robustness
1665 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1666 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1667 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1670 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1674 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1675 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1676 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1677 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1678 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1680 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1684 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1687 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1691 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1692 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1693 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1694 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1696 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1697 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1699 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1700 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1701 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1704 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1706 ** Improved robustness
1708 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1709 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1711 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1712 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1713 or NFS-mounted partition.
1715 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1716 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1720 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1721 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1722 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1723 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1724 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1725 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1727 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1728 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1730 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1731 or neglect to report file removal.
1733 For the "groups" command:
1735 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1736 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1738 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1740 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1742 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1746 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1747 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1750 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1752 ** Changes in behavior
1754 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1755 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1756 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1757 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1759 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1760 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1761 a final `./' or `../' component.
1763 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1764 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1765 this only for pipes.
1767 ** Infrastructure changes
1769 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1770 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1771 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1772 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1776 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1777 name is "." or "..".
1779 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1780 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1781 dirent.d_type support.
1783 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1784 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1786 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1787 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1788 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1789 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1792 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1794 ** Changes in behavior
1796 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1800 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1801 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1805 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1806 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1807 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1809 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1810 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1812 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1813 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1815 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1817 ** Improved robustness
1819 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1820 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1821 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1823 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1824 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1827 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1828 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1830 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1831 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1833 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1834 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1836 ** Changes in behavior
1838 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1839 where the two are distinct.
1841 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1842 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1843 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1844 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1845 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1846 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1847 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1848 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1849 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1850 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1851 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1852 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1853 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1854 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1855 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1856 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1857 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1859 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1860 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1861 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1863 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1864 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1865 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1866 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1869 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1870 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1874 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1875 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1876 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1877 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1879 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1880 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1881 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1883 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1884 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1885 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1886 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1887 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1890 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1891 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1893 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1894 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1895 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1896 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1898 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1899 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1900 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1902 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1903 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1904 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1905 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1907 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1908 and sticky) with the -m option.
1910 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1911 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1912 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1913 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1914 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1916 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1917 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1919 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1923 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1924 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1925 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1926 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1928 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1930 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1932 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1933 silently ignoring one of them.
1935 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1936 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1937 containing this change was 5.92.
1939 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1940 automatically newline terminated.
1942 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1943 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1944 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1945 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1948 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1949 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1950 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1953 ** Scheduled for removal
1955 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1956 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1958 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1959 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1960 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1961 command to unlink a directory.
1963 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1964 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1965 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1966 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1970 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1971 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1972 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1973 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1974 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1975 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1979 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1980 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1982 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1984 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1985 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1986 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1988 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1989 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1992 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1993 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1995 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1996 list directories before files.
1998 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1999 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2000 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2001 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2004 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2006 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
2008 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2009 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2010 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2012 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2013 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2017 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2018 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2019 usually printing nothing.
2021 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2023 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2024 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2025 them with hard-linked directories.
2027 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2028 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2029 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2031 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2032 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2033 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2035 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2038 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2039 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2041 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2042 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2044 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2045 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2047 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2048 all command-line arguments.
2050 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2052 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2054 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2055 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2057 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2059 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2060 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2061 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2062 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2063 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2065 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2066 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2068 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2069 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2070 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2071 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2073 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2075 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2079 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2080 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2082 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2083 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2085 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
2086 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2088 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2089 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
2091 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2092 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2094 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2096 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2097 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2098 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2101 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2103 ** Build-related bug fixes
2105 installing .mo files would fail
2108 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2112 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2114 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2117 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2121 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2122 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2126 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2128 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2129 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2131 ** Deprecated options
2133 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2134 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
2136 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2140 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2142 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2143 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2144 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2145 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2147 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2150 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2156 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2161 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2163 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2165 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2166 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2167 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2169 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2170 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2171 problematic usages. These include:
2173 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2174 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2175 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2176 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2177 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2178 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2179 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2180 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2181 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2183 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2184 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2186 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2187 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2188 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2189 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2191 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2192 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2193 between binary and text files.
2195 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2199 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2203 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2204 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2206 head tac tail tee tr
2207 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2209 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2210 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2212 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2213 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2214 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2216 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2218 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2220 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2221 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2222 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2226 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2228 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2229 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2231 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2232 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2233 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2237 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2238 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2242 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2243 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2244 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2248 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2249 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2253 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2255 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2257 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2261 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2262 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2263 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2265 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2266 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2267 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2268 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2269 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2271 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2275 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2276 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2277 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2279 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2281 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2282 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2283 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2284 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2286 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2288 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2289 rather than silently wrapping around.
2291 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2292 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2294 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2295 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2297 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2298 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2299 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2300 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2302 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2304 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2306 ** Improved robustness
2308 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2309 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2310 no matter how large the result.
2312 ** Improved portability
2314 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2315 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2317 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2319 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2320 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2321 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2323 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2324 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2328 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2329 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2331 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2333 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2334 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2335 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2336 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2338 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2339 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2341 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2342 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2343 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2345 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2347 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2348 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2350 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2351 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2353 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2355 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2356 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2358 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2359 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2361 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2362 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2363 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2365 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2367 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2369 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2373 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2375 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2376 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2377 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2379 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2380 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2382 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2383 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2384 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2386 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2387 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2389 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2390 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2391 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2392 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2394 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2395 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2397 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2398 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2399 the file system does not support it.
2401 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2403 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2404 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2406 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2408 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2409 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2411 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2412 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2413 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2414 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2416 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2417 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2420 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2421 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2422 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2423 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2425 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2426 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2427 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2428 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2430 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2431 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2433 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2435 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2436 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2437 reporting incorrect results.
2441 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2442 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2444 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2447 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2449 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2450 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2452 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2453 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2455 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2458 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2459 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2460 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2461 the file name does not look like a page range.
2463 printf has several changes:
2465 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2466 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2468 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2469 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2470 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2472 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2473 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2476 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2477 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2479 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2480 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2482 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2484 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2485 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2487 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2489 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2491 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2492 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2493 when first encountering the directory.
2497 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2498 output; POSIX requires this.
2500 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2501 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2503 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2505 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2506 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2508 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2509 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2511 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2512 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2513 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2514 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2515 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2516 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2517 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2519 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2520 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2521 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2523 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2524 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2526 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2528 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2530 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2531 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2532 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2533 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2535 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2539 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2540 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2541 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2542 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2543 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2545 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2546 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2547 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2549 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2550 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2552 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2553 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2555 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2556 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2557 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2558 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2559 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2561 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2562 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2564 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2565 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2567 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2569 nocreat do not create the output file
2570 excl fail if the output file already exists
2571 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2572 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2574 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2576 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2577 direct use direct I/O for data
2578 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2579 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2580 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2581 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2582 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2584 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2586 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2587 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2590 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2591 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2592 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2593 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2594 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2595 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2597 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2598 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2600 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2603 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2605 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2607 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2608 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2610 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2611 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2612 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2614 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2615 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2616 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2618 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2620 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2621 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2623 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2624 for compatibility with bash.
2626 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2628 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2629 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2630 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2631 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2633 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2634 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2636 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2637 ls supports TABSIZE.
2638 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2639 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2640 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2642 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2645 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2647 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2648 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2649 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2650 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2651 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2652 an offset, not as a file name.
2654 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2655 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2657 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2658 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2660 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2661 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2663 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2664 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2665 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2667 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2668 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2670 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2671 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2675 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2677 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2679 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2683 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2684 or more arguments between partitions.
2686 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2687 holes in the destination.
2689 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2690 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2691 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2692 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2693 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2694 terminates immediately.
2696 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2698 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2700 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2701 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2702 not the empty string.
2704 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2705 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2709 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2710 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2711 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2714 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2721 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2725 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2726 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2728 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2729 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2731 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2732 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2733 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2736 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2740 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2741 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2743 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2744 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2746 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2747 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2748 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2750 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2752 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2755 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2757 ** Configuration option
2759 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2760 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2764 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2765 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2769 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2770 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2771 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2774 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2775 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2776 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2777 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2778 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2779 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2780 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2783 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2787 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2788 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2789 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2791 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2792 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2794 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2796 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2797 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2798 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2799 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2801 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2803 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2804 not just the ones that reference directories
2806 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2807 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2809 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2810 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2811 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2813 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2814 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2815 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2816 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2817 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2818 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2820 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2825 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2826 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2828 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2830 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2832 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2834 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2835 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2837 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2838 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2840 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2842 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2846 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2848 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2850 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2851 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2852 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2853 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2854 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2856 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2857 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2859 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2860 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2862 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2863 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2865 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2866 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2867 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2871 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2872 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2873 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2874 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2875 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2876 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2877 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2878 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2879 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2880 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2881 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2882 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2883 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2884 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2886 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2888 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2889 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2891 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2893 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2895 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2896 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2898 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2900 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2901 without a trailing newline.
2903 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2904 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2906 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2909 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2913 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2915 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2917 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2918 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2919 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2920 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2922 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2924 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2925 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2926 be printed without leading spaces.
2928 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2929 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2934 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2935 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2936 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2938 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2940 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2941 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2943 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2944 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2946 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2947 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2949 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2951 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2953 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2955 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2956 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2958 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2960 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2962 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2963 byte offsets are specified.
2966 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2969 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2972 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2973 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2974 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2975 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2976 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2977 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2978 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2979 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2980 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2981 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2982 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2983 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2984 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2985 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2986 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2987 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2988 directory where M has write access.
2989 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2990 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2991 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2994 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2995 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2996 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2997 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2998 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2999 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
3000 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3001 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3002 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3003 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3004 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3005 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3006 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3007 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3008 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3009 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3010 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3011 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3012 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
3013 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3014 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3015 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3016 appeared one additional time.
3018 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3019 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3020 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3021 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3024 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
3025 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3026 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3027 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3028 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3029 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3030 if there were more than 338.
3032 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3033 - false --help now exits nonzero
3036 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3037 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3038 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3039 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3042 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3043 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
3044 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
3045 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3046 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3049 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3050 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3051 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3052 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
3053 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3054 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3055 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3058 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3059 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3060 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3061 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3062 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3063 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3065 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3066 under certain unusual conditions
3067 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3068 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3071 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3072 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3073 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3074 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3075 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3076 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
3077 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3078 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3079 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
3080 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
3081 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3082 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3083 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3084 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3085 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3086 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3089 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3090 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3093 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3094 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3095 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3096 involving hard-linked directories
3097 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3098 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
3099 character-special and block files
3102 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3103 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3104 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3105 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3106 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3107 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3108 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3109 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3110 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3112 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
3113 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
3114 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3115 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3116 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3117 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3118 specified on the command line.
3119 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3120 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
3121 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3122 the first file untouched.
3123 * readlink: new program
3124 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3125 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3126 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3127 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3128 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3129 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3132 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3133 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3134 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3135 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3136 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3137 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3138 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3139 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3140 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3141 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3142 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3143 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3145 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3146 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3147 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3149 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3150 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3151 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3152 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3153 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3154 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3155 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3156 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3159 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3160 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3163 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3164 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3165 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3166 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3167 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3168 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3169 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3172 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3173 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3175 ========================================================================
3176 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3177 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3180 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3182 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3183 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3184 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3185 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3186 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3187 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3188 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3189 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3190 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3191 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3192 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3193 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3195 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3196 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3197 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3198 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3200 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3203 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3205 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3206 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3207 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3208 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3209 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3210 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3211 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3214 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3215 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3216 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3217 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3218 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3219 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3220 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3221 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3222 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3223 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3224 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3225 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3226 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3227 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3228 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3229 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3231 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3232 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3234 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3235 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3236 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3237 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3238 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3239 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3241 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3242 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3243 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3244 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3245 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3246 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3247 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3249 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3250 the source files in the following example:
3251 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3252 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3253 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3254 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3255 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3256 links between source files with --preserve=links
3257 * cp accepts new options:
3258 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3259 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3260 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3261 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3262 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3263 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3264 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3265 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3266 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3268 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3269 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3270 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3271 even though it's older than dest.
3272 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3273 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3274 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3275 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3276 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3278 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3279 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3280 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3281 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3282 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3283 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3284 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3286 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3287 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3288 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3290 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3291 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3292 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3293 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3294 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3295 This is the default.
3297 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3298 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3299 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3300 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3301 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3303 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3306 ========================================================================
3307 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3308 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3311 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3312 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3314 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3315 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3316 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3317 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3318 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3320 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3321 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3322 that specifies a non-directory
3325 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3326 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3327 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3328 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3329 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3330 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3331 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3332 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3333 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3334 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3335 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3336 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3337 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3338 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3339 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3340 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3341 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3342 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3343 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3344 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3345 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3346 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3347 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3348 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3350 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3351 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3352 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3354 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3356 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3357 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3359 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3360 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3361 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3362 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3363 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3365 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3366 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3367 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3368 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3369 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3371 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3373 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3374 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3375 * still more portability fixes
3376 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3377 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3379 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3381 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3383 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3385 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3386 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3387 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3388 there is any time remaining
3389 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3391 ========================================================================
3392 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3393 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3395 This package began as the union of the following:
3396 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3398 ========================================================================
3400 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3402 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3403 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3404 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3405 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3406 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3407 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.