1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
8 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
9 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
11 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
12 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
13 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
15 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
16 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
18 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
19 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
21 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
22 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
24 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
25 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
29 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
30 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
31 processed portion thereof.
33 ** Changes in behavior
35 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
36 The sync in only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.38.
37 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
39 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
40 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
42 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
45 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
49 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
50 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
51 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
52 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
53 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
55 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
56 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
58 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
59 reject file names invalid for that file system.
61 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
62 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
66 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
67 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
68 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
69 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
70 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
71 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
72 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
73 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
75 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
76 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
77 the same number of fields are output for each line.
79 ** Changes in behavior
81 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
82 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
83 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
86 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
90 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
91 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
92 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
95 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
99 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
100 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
102 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
103 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
105 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
106 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
108 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
109 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
110 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
111 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
113 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
114 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
116 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
117 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
118 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
120 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
122 ** Changes in behavior
124 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
125 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
126 to the number of available processors.
130 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
133 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
137 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
138 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
139 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
140 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
142 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
143 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
144 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
146 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
147 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
149 ** Changes in behavior
151 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
152 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
154 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
155 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
156 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
157 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
158 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
159 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
161 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
162 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
163 the same way as the others.
166 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
170 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
171 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
172 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
174 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
175 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
177 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
178 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
179 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
181 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
182 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
184 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
185 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
187 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
188 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
189 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
191 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
192 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
193 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
194 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
198 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
199 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
201 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
204 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
205 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
207 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
209 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
210 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
211 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
213 ** Changes in behavior
215 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
216 rather than its aliased target.
218 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
219 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
220 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
222 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
223 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
224 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
225 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
226 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
227 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
228 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
229 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
231 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
233 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
235 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
236 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
239 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
240 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
241 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
242 control like taskset for example.
244 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
246 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
247 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
248 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
249 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
250 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
251 includes %C when context information is available.
253 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
254 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
255 rather than a file system attribute.
257 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
258 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
259 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
260 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
262 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
263 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
264 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
266 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
267 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
268 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
271 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
275 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
276 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
278 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
280 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
281 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
283 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
284 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
285 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
286 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
288 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
289 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
290 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
294 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
295 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
297 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
298 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
299 duration after the initial signal was sent.
301 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
302 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
303 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
304 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
305 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
306 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
307 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
308 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
309 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
311 ** Changes in behavior
313 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
314 sequence when it would be a no-op.
316 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
317 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
320 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
324 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
325 of available processors, which may not have been the case
326 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
327 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
331 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
332 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
334 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
335 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
336 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
337 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
339 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
340 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
341 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
344 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
348 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
349 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
350 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
352 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
353 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
354 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
356 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
357 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
359 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
360 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
361 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
362 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
364 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
365 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
366 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
368 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
369 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
370 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
371 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
373 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
374 renamed-aside and then recreated.
375 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
377 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
378 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
379 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
380 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
382 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
383 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
384 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
386 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
387 processes will not intersperse their output.
388 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
391 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
395 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
396 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
398 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
399 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
401 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
402 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
403 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
404 the presence of the empty string argument.
405 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
407 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
408 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
409 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
410 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
412 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
413 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
415 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
416 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
417 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
419 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
420 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
421 and with a malicious user on the same system
422 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
423 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
426 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
430 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
431 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
432 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
434 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
435 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
436 offending directory and all "contents."
438 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
439 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
440 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
442 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
443 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
444 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
446 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
447 processes will not intersperse their output.
448 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
449 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
451 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
452 output the name of the file to stdout.
453 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
455 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
456 call fails with errno == EACCES.
457 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
459 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
460 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
463 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
464 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
465 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
467 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
468 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
469 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
470 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
471 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
472 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
474 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
475 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
476 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
477 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
479 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
480 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
482 ** Changes in behavior
484 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
485 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
486 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
487 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
488 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
490 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
491 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
492 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
493 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
495 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
497 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
498 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
499 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
500 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
501 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
505 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
509 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
510 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
512 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
513 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
515 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
516 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
517 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
519 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
520 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
523 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
527 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
528 when the source file doesn't have write access.
529 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
531 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
532 to accommodate leap seconds.
533 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
535 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
536 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
537 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
539 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
541 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
542 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
543 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
545 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
546 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
547 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
548 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
549 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
553 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
554 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
555 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
556 directory or a symlink to a directory.
558 ** Changes in behavior
560 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
561 environment variable is set.
563 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
564 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
565 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
569 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
570 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
571 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
572 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
574 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
575 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
576 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
577 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
581 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
582 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
583 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
585 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
586 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
587 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
588 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
589 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
590 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
593 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
594 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
597 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
601 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
602 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
603 and libraries tested at configure time.
604 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
606 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
607 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
609 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
610 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
612 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
613 printing a summary to stderr.
614 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
616 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
617 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
618 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
620 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
621 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
623 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
624 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
625 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
626 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
628 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
629 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
630 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
631 which is relatively unusual.
632 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
634 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
635 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
636 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
637 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
638 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
639 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
640 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
644 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
645 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
646 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
647 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
648 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
652 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
653 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
655 ** Changes in behavior
657 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
658 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
659 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
660 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
661 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
664 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
668 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
669 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
671 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
672 before data copying has started.
674 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
675 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
677 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
678 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
679 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
680 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
682 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
683 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
684 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
685 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
687 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
692 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
693 for its standard streams.
695 ** Changes in behavior
697 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
698 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
699 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
700 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
701 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
702 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
704 ** Deprecated options
706 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
707 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
711 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
713 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
714 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
717 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
719 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
720 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
722 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
723 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
726 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
730 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
731 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
732 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
733 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
735 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
736 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
737 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
738 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
739 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
744 make check: two tests have been corrected
748 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
749 inherited from gnulib.
752 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
756 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
757 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
758 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
759 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
761 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
762 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
764 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
766 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
767 systems without xattr support.
769 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
770 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
771 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
773 ** Changes in behavior
775 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
776 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
777 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
778 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
780 ** Improved robustness
782 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
783 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
784 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
785 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
786 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
787 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
788 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
789 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
790 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
794 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
795 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
797 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
798 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
799 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
800 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
801 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
804 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
808 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
809 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
810 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
814 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
815 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
816 data was read, or on process exit.
817 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
819 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
820 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
821 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
822 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
824 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
825 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
826 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
827 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
829 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
830 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
832 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
833 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
835 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
836 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
837 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
839 ** Changes in behavior
841 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
842 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
843 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
845 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
846 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
848 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
849 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
850 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
853 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
857 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
859 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
860 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
861 install: Never copies xattrs
863 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
864 from overwriting any existing destination file
866 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
867 mode where this feature is available.
869 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
870 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
871 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
872 do not modify the destination at all.
874 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
876 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
880 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
881 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
883 cp uses much less memory in some situations
885 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
886 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
888 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
889 processing the first file name
891 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
892 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
893 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
894 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
896 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
897 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
899 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
900 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
903 ** Changes in behavior
905 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
906 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
908 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
909 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
910 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
912 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
913 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
915 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
917 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
918 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
919 is still marked with a '+'.
922 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
926 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
927 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
931 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
932 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
933 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
934 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
935 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
936 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
938 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
939 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
941 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
942 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
944 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
946 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
947 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
948 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
950 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
951 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
953 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
954 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
955 used to factor large numbers.
957 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
960 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
962 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
964 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
965 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
967 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
968 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
969 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
970 maximum command-line (argv) length.
972 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
973 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
974 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
976 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
977 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
981 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
983 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
984 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
986 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
987 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
989 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
991 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
992 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
996 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
997 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
998 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1000 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1002 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1003 no matter how many files are in a given directory
1005 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1006 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1007 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1009 ** Changes in behavior
1011 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1012 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1015 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1019 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1021 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1022 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1023 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1025 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1026 with no USERNAME argument.
1028 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1029 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1030 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1032 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1033 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1034 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1035 number of fields for some inputs.
1037 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1038 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1040 ** Changes in behavior
1042 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1043 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1046 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1050 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1052 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1053 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1054 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1055 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1057 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1058 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1060 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1061 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1063 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1064 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1066 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1067 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1068 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1069 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1071 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1072 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1073 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1074 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1075 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1076 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1078 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1079 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1081 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1082 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1083 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1085 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1086 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1088 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1089 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1091 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1092 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1093 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1094 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1096 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1097 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1099 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1100 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1102 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1103 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1104 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1108 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1109 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1111 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1112 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1113 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1114 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1118 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1119 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1121 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1123 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1127 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1128 which have negative errno values.
1132 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1136 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1140 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1141 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1144 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1148 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1149 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1150 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1152 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1153 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1154 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1155 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1159 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1160 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1161 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1162 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1165 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1169 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1171 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1172 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1173 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1176 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1180 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1181 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1183 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1185 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1187 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1189 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1193 ** Changes in behavior
1195 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1196 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1198 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1199 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1201 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1202 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1203 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1207 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1208 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1209 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1210 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1211 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1212 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1213 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1214 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1215 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1216 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1217 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1219 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1220 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1221 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1224 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1227 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1228 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1229 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1231 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1232 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1233 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1236 ** New build options
1238 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1239 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1240 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1241 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1243 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1244 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1245 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1246 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1247 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1248 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1249 of "make check" fail.
1251 ** Remove deprecated options
1253 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1254 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1255 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1256 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1257 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1259 ** Improved robustness
1261 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1262 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1263 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1264 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1265 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1266 loss of the contents of a/f.
1268 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1269 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1273 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1274 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1275 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1277 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1278 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1279 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1280 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1282 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1283 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1284 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1285 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1286 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1287 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1288 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1289 destination is a symlink.
1291 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1293 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1294 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1296 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1297 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1299 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1301 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1302 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1304 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1305 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1307 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1310 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1311 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1313 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1314 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1316 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1317 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1318 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1319 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1321 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1322 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1323 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1325 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1326 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1327 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1329 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1330 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1331 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1332 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1334 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1335 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1336 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1338 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1339 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1341 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1342 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1344 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1346 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1347 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1348 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1350 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1351 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1353 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1354 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1356 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1357 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1359 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1360 [present in the original version]
1363 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1367 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1369 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1370 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1371 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1373 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1374 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1376 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1380 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1381 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1383 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1384 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1386 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1387 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1389 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1390 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1391 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1392 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1393 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1394 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1396 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1397 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1400 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1401 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1403 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1406 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1407 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1408 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1410 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1411 directory is unreadable.
1413 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1414 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1415 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1417 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1418 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1419 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1420 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1421 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1424 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1425 Before it would print nothing.
1427 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1429 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1430 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1431 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1432 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1433 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1434 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1435 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1436 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1438 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1442 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1443 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1444 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1446 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1447 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1448 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1449 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1452 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1456 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1457 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1458 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1459 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1460 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1461 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1462 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1464 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1465 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1466 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1467 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1468 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1469 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1470 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1471 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1473 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1474 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1475 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1478 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1482 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1483 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1485 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1486 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1487 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1489 ** Improved robustness
1491 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1492 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1493 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1496 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1500 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1501 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1502 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1503 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1504 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1506 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1510 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1513 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1517 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1518 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1519 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1520 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1522 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1523 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1525 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1526 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1527 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1530 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1532 ** Improved robustness
1534 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1535 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1537 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1538 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1539 or NFS-mounted partition.
1541 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1542 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1546 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1547 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1548 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1549 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1550 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1551 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1553 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1554 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1556 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1557 or neglect to report file removal.
1559 For the "groups" command:
1561 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1562 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1564 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1566 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1568 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1572 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1573 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1576 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1578 ** Changes in behavior
1580 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1581 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1582 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1583 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1585 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1586 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1587 a final `./' or `../' component.
1589 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1590 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1591 this only for pipes.
1593 ** Infrastructure changes
1595 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1596 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1597 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1598 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1602 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1603 name is "." or "..".
1605 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1606 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1607 dirent.d_type support.
1609 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1610 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1612 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1613 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1614 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1615 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1618 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1620 ** Changes in behavior
1622 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1626 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1627 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1631 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1632 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1633 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1635 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1636 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1638 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1639 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1641 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1643 ** Improved robustness
1645 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1646 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1647 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1649 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1650 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1653 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1654 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1656 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1657 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1659 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1660 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1662 ** Changes in behavior
1664 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1665 where the two are distinct.
1667 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1668 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1669 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1670 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1671 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1672 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1673 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1674 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1675 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1676 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1677 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1678 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1679 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1680 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1681 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1682 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1683 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1685 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1686 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1687 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1689 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1690 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1691 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1692 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1695 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1696 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1700 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1701 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1702 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1703 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1705 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1706 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1707 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1709 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1710 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1711 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1712 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1713 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1716 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1717 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1719 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1720 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1721 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1722 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1724 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1725 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1726 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1728 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1729 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1730 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1731 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1733 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1734 and sticky) with the -m option.
1736 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1737 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1738 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1739 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1740 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1742 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1743 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1745 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1749 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1750 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1751 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1752 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1754 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1756 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1758 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1759 silently ignoring one of them.
1761 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1762 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1763 containing this change was 5.92.
1765 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1766 automatically newline terminated.
1768 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1769 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1770 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1771 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1774 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1775 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1776 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1779 ** Scheduled for removal
1781 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1782 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1784 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1785 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1786 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1787 command to unlink a directory.
1789 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1790 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1791 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1792 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1796 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1797 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1798 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1799 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1800 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1801 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1805 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1806 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1808 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1810 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1811 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1812 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1814 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1815 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1818 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1819 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1821 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1822 list directories before files.
1824 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1825 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1826 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1827 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1830 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1832 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1834 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1835 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1836 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1838 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1839 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1843 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1844 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1845 usually printing nothing.
1847 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1849 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1850 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1851 them with hard-linked directories.
1853 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1854 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1855 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1857 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1858 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1859 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1861 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1864 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1865 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1867 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1868 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1870 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1871 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1873 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1874 all command-line arguments.
1876 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1878 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1880 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1881 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1883 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1885 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1886 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1887 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1888 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1889 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1891 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1892 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1894 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1895 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1896 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1897 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1899 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1901 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1905 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1906 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1908 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1909 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1911 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1912 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1914 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1915 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1917 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1918 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1920 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1922 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1923 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1924 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1927 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1929 ** Build-related bug fixes
1931 installing .mo files would fail
1934 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1938 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1940 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1943 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1947 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1948 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1952 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1954 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1955 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1957 ** Deprecated options
1959 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1960 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1962 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1966 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1968 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1969 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1970 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1971 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1973 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1976 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1982 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1987 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1989 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1991 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1992 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1993 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1995 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1996 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1997 problematic usages. These include:
1999 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2000 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2001 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2002 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2003 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2004 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2005 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2006 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2007 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2009 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2010 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2012 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2013 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2014 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2015 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2017 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2018 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2019 between binary and text files.
2021 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2025 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2029 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2030 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2032 head tac tail tee tr
2033 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2035 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2036 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2038 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2039 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2040 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2042 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2044 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2046 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2047 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2048 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2052 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2054 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2055 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2057 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2058 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2059 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2063 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2064 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2068 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2069 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2070 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2074 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2075 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2079 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2081 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2083 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2087 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2088 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2089 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2091 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2092 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2093 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2094 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2095 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2097 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2101 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2102 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2103 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2105 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2107 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2108 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2109 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2110 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2112 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2114 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2115 rather than silently wrapping around.
2117 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2118 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2120 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2121 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2123 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2124 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2125 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2126 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2128 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2130 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2132 ** Improved robustness
2134 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2135 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2136 no matter how large the result.
2138 ** Improved portability
2140 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2141 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2143 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2145 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2146 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2147 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2149 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2150 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2154 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2155 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2157 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2159 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2160 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2161 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2162 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2164 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2165 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2167 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2168 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2169 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2171 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2173 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2174 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2176 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2177 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2179 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2181 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2182 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2184 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2185 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2187 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2188 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2189 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2191 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2193 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2195 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2199 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2201 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2202 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2203 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2205 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2206 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2208 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2209 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2210 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2212 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2213 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2215 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2216 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2217 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2218 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2220 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2221 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2223 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2224 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2225 the file system does not support it.
2227 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2229 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2230 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2232 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2234 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2235 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2237 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2238 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2239 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2240 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2242 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2243 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2246 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2247 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2248 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2249 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2251 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2252 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2253 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2254 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2256 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2257 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2259 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2261 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2262 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2263 reporting incorrect results.
2267 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2268 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2270 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2273 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2275 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2276 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2278 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2279 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2281 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2284 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2285 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2286 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2287 the file name does not look like a page range.
2289 printf has several changes:
2291 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2292 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2294 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2295 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2296 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2298 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2299 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2302 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2303 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2305 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2306 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2308 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2310 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2311 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2313 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2315 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2317 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2318 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2319 when first encountering the directory.
2323 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2324 output; POSIX requires this.
2326 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2327 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2329 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2331 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2332 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2334 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2335 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2337 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2338 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2339 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2340 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2341 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2342 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2343 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2345 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2346 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2347 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2349 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2350 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2352 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2354 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2356 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2357 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2358 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2359 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2361 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2365 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2366 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2367 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2368 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2369 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2371 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2372 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2373 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2375 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2376 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2378 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2379 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2381 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2382 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2383 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2384 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2385 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2387 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2388 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2390 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2391 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2393 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2395 nocreat do not create the output file
2396 excl fail if the output file already exists
2397 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2398 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2400 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2402 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2403 direct use direct I/O for data
2404 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2405 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2406 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2407 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2408 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2410 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2412 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2413 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2416 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2417 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2418 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2419 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2420 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2421 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2423 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2424 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2426 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2429 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2431 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2433 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2434 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2436 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2437 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2438 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2440 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2441 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2442 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2444 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2446 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2447 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2449 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2450 for compatibility with bash.
2452 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2454 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2455 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2456 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2457 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2459 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2460 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2462 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2463 ls supports TABSIZE.
2464 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2465 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2466 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2468 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2471 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2473 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2474 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2475 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2476 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2477 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2478 an offset, not as a file name.
2480 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2481 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2483 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2484 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2486 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2487 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2489 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2490 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2491 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2493 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2494 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2496 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2497 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2501 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2503 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2505 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2509 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2510 or more arguments between partitions.
2512 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2513 holes in the destination.
2515 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2516 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2517 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2518 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2519 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2520 terminates immediately.
2522 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2524 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2526 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2527 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2528 not the empty string.
2530 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2531 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2535 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2536 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2537 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2540 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2547 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2551 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2552 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2554 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2555 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2557 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2558 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2559 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2562 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2566 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2567 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2569 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2570 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2572 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2573 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2574 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2576 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2578 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2581 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2583 ** Configuration option
2585 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2586 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2590 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2591 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2595 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2596 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2597 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2600 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2601 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2602 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2603 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2604 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2605 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2606 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2609 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2613 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2614 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2615 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2617 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2618 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2620 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2622 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2623 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2624 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2625 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2627 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2629 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2630 not just the ones that reference directories
2632 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2633 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2635 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2636 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2637 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2639 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2640 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2641 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2642 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2643 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2644 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2646 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2651 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2652 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2654 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2656 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2658 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2660 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2661 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2663 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2664 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2666 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2668 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2672 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2674 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2676 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2677 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2678 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2679 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2680 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2682 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2683 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2685 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2686 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2688 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2689 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2691 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2692 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2693 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2697 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2698 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2699 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2700 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2701 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2702 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2703 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2704 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2705 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2706 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2707 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2708 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2709 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2710 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2712 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2714 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2715 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2717 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2719 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2721 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2722 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2724 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2726 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2727 without a trailing newline.
2729 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2730 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2732 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2735 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2739 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2741 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2743 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2744 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2745 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2746 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2748 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2750 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2751 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2752 be printed without leading spaces.
2754 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2755 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2760 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2761 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2762 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2764 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2766 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2767 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2769 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2770 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2772 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2773 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2775 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2777 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2779 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2781 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2782 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2784 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2786 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2788 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2789 byte offsets are specified.
2792 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2795 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2798 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2799 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2800 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2801 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2802 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2803 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2804 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2805 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2806 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2807 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2808 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2809 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2810 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2811 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2812 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2813 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2814 directory where M has write access.
2815 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2816 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2817 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2820 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2821 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2822 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2823 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2824 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2825 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2826 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2827 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2828 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2829 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2830 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2831 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2832 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2833 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2834 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2835 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2836 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2837 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2838 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2839 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2840 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2841 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2842 appeared one additional time.
2844 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2845 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2846 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2847 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2850 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2851 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2852 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2853 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2854 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2855 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2856 if there were more than 338.
2858 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2859 - false --help now exits nonzero
2862 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2863 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2864 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2865 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2868 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2869 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2870 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2871 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2872 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2875 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2876 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2877 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2878 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2879 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2880 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2881 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2884 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2885 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2886 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2887 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2888 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2889 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2891 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2892 under certain unusual conditions
2893 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2894 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2897 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2898 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2899 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2900 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2901 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2902 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2903 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2904 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2905 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2906 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2907 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2908 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2909 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2910 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2911 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2912 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2915 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2916 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2919 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2920 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2921 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2922 involving hard-linked directories
2923 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2924 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2925 character-special and block files
2928 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2929 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2930 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2931 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2932 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2933 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2934 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2935 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2936 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2938 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2939 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2940 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2941 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2942 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2943 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2944 specified on the command line.
2945 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2946 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2947 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2948 the first file untouched.
2949 * readlink: new program
2950 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2951 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2952 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2953 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2954 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2955 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2958 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2959 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2960 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2961 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2962 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2963 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2964 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2965 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2966 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2967 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2968 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2969 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2971 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2972 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2973 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2975 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2976 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2977 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2978 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2979 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2980 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2981 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2982 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2985 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2986 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2989 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2990 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2991 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2992 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2993 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2994 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2995 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2998 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2999 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3001 ========================================================================
3002 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3003 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3006 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3008 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3009 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3010 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3011 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3012 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3013 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3014 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3015 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3016 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3017 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3018 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3019 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3021 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3022 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3023 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3024 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3026 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3029 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3031 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3032 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3033 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3034 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3035 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3036 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3037 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3040 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3041 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3042 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3043 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3044 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3045 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3046 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3047 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3048 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3049 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3050 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3051 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3052 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3053 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3054 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3055 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3057 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3058 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3060 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3061 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3062 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3063 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3064 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3065 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3067 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3068 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3069 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3070 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3071 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3072 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3073 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3075 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3076 the source files in the following example:
3077 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3078 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3079 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3080 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3081 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3082 links between source files with --preserve=links
3083 * cp accepts new options:
3084 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3085 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3086 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3087 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3088 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3089 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3090 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3091 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3092 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3094 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3095 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3096 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3097 even though it's older than dest.
3098 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3099 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3100 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3101 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3102 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3104 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3105 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3106 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3107 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3108 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3109 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3110 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3112 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3113 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3114 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3116 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3117 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3118 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3119 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3120 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3121 This is the default.
3123 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3124 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3125 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3126 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3127 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3129 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3132 ========================================================================
3133 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3134 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3137 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3138 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3140 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3141 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3142 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3143 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3144 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3146 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3147 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3148 that specifies a non-directory
3151 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3152 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3153 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3154 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3155 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3156 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3157 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3158 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3159 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3160 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3161 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3162 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3163 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3164 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3165 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3166 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3167 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3168 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3169 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3170 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3171 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3172 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3173 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3174 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3176 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3177 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3178 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3180 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3182 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3183 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3185 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3186 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3187 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3188 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3189 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3191 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3192 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3193 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3194 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3195 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3197 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3199 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3200 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3201 * still more portability fixes
3202 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3203 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3205 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3207 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3209 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3211 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3212 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3213 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3214 there is any time remaining
3215 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3217 ========================================================================
3218 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3219 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3221 This package began as the union of the following:
3222 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3224 ========================================================================
3226 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3228 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3229 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3230 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3231 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3232 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3233 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.