1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
6 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
10 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
11 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
12 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
14 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
15 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
16 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
18 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
19 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
20 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
22 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
23 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
25 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
26 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
28 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
29 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
31 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
32 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
36 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
37 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
38 processed portion thereof.
40 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
41 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
43 ** Changes in behavior
45 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
46 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
47 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
49 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
50 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
51 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
53 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
54 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
56 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
57 Use --preserve-context instead.
59 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
62 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
66 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
67 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
68 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
69 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
70 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
72 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
73 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
75 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
76 reject file names invalid for that file system.
78 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
79 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
83 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
84 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
85 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
86 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
87 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
88 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
89 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
90 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
92 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
93 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
94 the same number of fields are output for each line.
96 ** Changes in behavior
98 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
99 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
100 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
103 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
107 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
108 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
109 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
112 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
116 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
117 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
119 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
120 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
122 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
123 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
125 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
126 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
127 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
128 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
130 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
131 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
133 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
134 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
135 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
137 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
139 ** Changes in behavior
141 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
142 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
143 to the number of available processors.
147 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
150 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
154 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
155 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
156 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
157 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
159 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
160 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
161 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
163 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
164 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
166 ** Changes in behavior
168 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
169 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
171 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
172 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
173 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
174 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
175 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
176 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
178 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
179 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
180 the same way as the others.
183 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
187 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
188 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
189 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
191 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
192 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
194 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
195 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
196 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
198 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
199 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
201 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
202 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
204 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
205 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
206 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
208 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
209 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
210 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
211 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
215 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
216 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
218 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
221 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
222 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
224 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
226 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
227 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
228 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
230 ** Changes in behavior
232 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
233 rather than its aliased target.
235 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
236 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
237 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
239 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
240 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
241 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
242 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
243 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
244 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
245 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
246 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
248 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
250 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
252 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
253 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
256 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
257 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
258 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
259 control like taskset for example.
261 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
263 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
264 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
265 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
266 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
267 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
268 includes %C when context information is available.
270 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
271 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
272 rather than a file system attribute.
274 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
275 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
276 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
277 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
279 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
280 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
281 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
283 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
284 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
285 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
288 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
292 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
293 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
295 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
297 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
298 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
300 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
301 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
302 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
303 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
305 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
306 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
307 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
311 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
312 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
314 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
315 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
316 duration after the initial signal was sent.
318 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
319 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
320 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
321 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
322 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
323 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
324 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
325 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
326 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
328 ** Changes in behavior
330 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
331 sequence when it would be a no-op.
333 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
334 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
337 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
341 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
342 of available processors, which may not have been the case
343 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
344 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
348 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
349 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
351 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
352 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
353 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
354 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
356 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
357 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
358 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
361 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
365 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
366 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
367 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
369 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
370 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
371 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
373 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
374 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
376 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
377 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
378 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
379 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
381 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
382 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
383 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
385 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
386 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
387 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
388 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
390 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
391 renamed-aside and then recreated.
392 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
394 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
395 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
396 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
397 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
399 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
400 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
401 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
403 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
404 processes will not intersperse their output.
405 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
408 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
412 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
413 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
415 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
416 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
418 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
419 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
420 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
421 the presence of the empty string argument.
422 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
424 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
425 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
426 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
427 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
429 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
430 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
432 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
433 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
434 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
436 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
437 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
438 and with a malicious user on the same system
439 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
440 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
443 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
447 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
448 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
449 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
451 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
452 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
453 offending directory and all "contents."
455 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
456 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
457 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
459 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
460 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
461 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
463 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
464 processes will not intersperse their output.
465 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
466 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
468 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
469 output the name of the file to stdout.
470 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
472 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
473 call fails with errno == EACCES.
474 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
476 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
477 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
480 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
481 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
482 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
484 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
485 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
486 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
487 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
488 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
489 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
491 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
492 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
493 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
494 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
496 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
497 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
499 ** Changes in behavior
501 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
502 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
503 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
504 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
505 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
507 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
508 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
509 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
510 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
512 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
514 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
515 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
516 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
517 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
518 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
522 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
526 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
527 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
529 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
530 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
532 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
533 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
534 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
536 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
537 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
540 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
544 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
545 when the source file doesn't have write access.
546 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
548 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
549 to accommodate leap seconds.
550 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
552 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
553 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
554 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
556 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
558 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
559 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
560 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
562 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
563 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
564 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
565 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
566 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
570 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
571 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
572 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
573 directory or a symlink to a directory.
575 ** Changes in behavior
577 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
578 environment variable is set.
580 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
581 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
582 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
586 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
587 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
588 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
589 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
591 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
592 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
593 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
594 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
598 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
599 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
600 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
602 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
603 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
604 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
605 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
606 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
607 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
610 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
611 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
614 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
618 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
619 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
620 and libraries tested at configure time.
621 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
623 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
624 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
626 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
627 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
629 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
630 printing a summary to stderr.
631 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
633 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
634 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
635 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
637 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
638 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
640 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
641 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
642 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
643 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
645 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
646 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
647 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
648 which is relatively unusual.
649 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
651 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
652 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
653 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
654 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
655 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
656 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
657 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
661 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
662 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
663 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
664 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
665 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
669 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
670 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
672 ** Changes in behavior
674 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
675 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
676 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
677 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
678 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
681 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
685 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
686 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
688 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
689 before data copying has started.
691 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
692 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
694 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
695 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
696 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
697 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
699 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
700 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
701 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
702 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
704 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
709 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
710 for its standard streams.
712 ** Changes in behavior
714 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
715 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
716 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
717 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
718 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
719 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
721 ** Deprecated options
723 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
724 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
728 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
730 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
731 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
734 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
736 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
737 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
739 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
740 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
743 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
747 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
748 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
749 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
750 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
752 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
753 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
754 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
755 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
756 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
761 make check: two tests have been corrected
765 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
766 inherited from gnulib.
769 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
773 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
774 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
775 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
776 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
778 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
779 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
781 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
783 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
784 systems without xattr support.
786 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
787 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
788 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
790 ** Changes in behavior
792 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
793 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
794 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
795 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
797 ** Improved robustness
799 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
800 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
801 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
802 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
803 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
804 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
805 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
806 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
807 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
811 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
812 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
814 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
815 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
816 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
817 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
818 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
821 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
825 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
826 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
827 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
831 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
832 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
833 data was read, or on process exit.
834 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
836 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
837 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
838 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
839 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
841 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
842 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
843 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
844 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
846 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
847 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
849 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
850 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
852 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
853 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
854 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
856 ** Changes in behavior
858 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
859 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
860 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
862 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
863 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
865 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
866 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
867 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
870 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
874 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
876 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
877 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
878 install: Never copies xattrs
880 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
881 from overwriting any existing destination file
883 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
884 mode where this feature is available.
886 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
887 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
888 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
889 do not modify the destination at all.
891 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
893 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
897 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
898 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
900 cp uses much less memory in some situations
902 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
903 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
905 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
906 processing the first file name
908 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
909 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
910 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
911 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
913 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
914 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
916 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
917 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
920 ** Changes in behavior
922 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
923 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
925 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
926 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
927 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
929 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
930 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
932 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
934 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
935 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
936 is still marked with a '+'.
939 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
943 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
944 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
948 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
949 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
950 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
951 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
952 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
953 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
955 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
956 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
958 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
959 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
961 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
963 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
964 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
965 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
967 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
968 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
970 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
971 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
972 used to factor large numbers.
974 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
977 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
979 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
981 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
982 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
984 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
985 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
986 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
987 maximum command-line (argv) length.
989 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
990 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
991 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
993 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
994 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
998 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1000 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1001 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1003 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1004 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1006 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1008 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1009 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1013 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1014 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1015 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1017 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1019 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1020 no matter how many files are in a given directory
1022 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1023 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1024 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1026 ** Changes in behavior
1028 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1029 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1032 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1036 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1038 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1039 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1040 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1042 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1043 with no USERNAME argument.
1045 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1046 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1047 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1049 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1050 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1051 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1052 number of fields for some inputs.
1054 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1055 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1057 ** Changes in behavior
1059 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1060 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1063 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1067 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1069 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1070 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1071 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1072 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1074 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1075 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1077 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1078 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1080 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1081 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1083 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1084 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1085 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1086 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1088 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1089 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1090 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1091 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1092 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1093 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1095 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1096 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1098 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1099 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1100 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1102 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1103 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1105 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1106 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1108 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1109 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1110 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1111 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1113 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1114 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1116 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1117 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1119 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1120 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1121 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1125 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1126 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1128 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1129 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1130 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1131 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1135 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1136 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1138 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1140 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1144 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1145 which have negative errno values.
1149 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1153 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1157 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1158 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1161 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1165 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1166 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1167 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1169 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1170 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1171 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1172 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1176 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1177 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1178 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1179 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1182 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1186 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1188 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1189 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1190 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1193 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1197 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1198 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1200 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1202 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1204 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1206 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1210 ** Changes in behavior
1212 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1213 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1215 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1216 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1218 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1219 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1220 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1224 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1225 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1226 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1227 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1228 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1229 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1230 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1231 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1232 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1233 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1234 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1236 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1237 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1238 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1241 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1244 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1245 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1246 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1248 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1249 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1250 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1253 ** New build options
1255 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1256 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1257 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1258 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1260 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1261 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1262 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1263 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1264 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1265 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1266 of "make check" fail.
1268 ** Remove deprecated options
1270 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1271 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1272 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1273 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1274 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1276 ** Improved robustness
1278 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1279 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1280 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1281 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1282 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1283 loss of the contents of a/f.
1285 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1286 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1290 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1291 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1292 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1294 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1295 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1296 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1297 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1299 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1300 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1301 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1302 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1303 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1304 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1305 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1306 destination is a symlink.
1308 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1310 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1311 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1313 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1314 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1316 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1318 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1319 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1321 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1322 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1324 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1327 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1328 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1330 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1331 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1333 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1334 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1335 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1336 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1338 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1339 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1340 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1342 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1343 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1344 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1346 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1347 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1348 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1349 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1351 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1352 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1353 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1355 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1356 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1358 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1359 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1361 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1363 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1364 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1365 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1367 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1368 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1370 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1371 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1373 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1374 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1376 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1377 [present in the original version]
1380 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1384 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1386 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1387 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1388 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1390 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1391 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1393 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1397 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1398 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1400 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1401 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1403 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1404 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1406 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1407 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1408 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1409 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1410 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1411 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1413 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1414 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1417 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1418 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1420 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1423 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1424 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1425 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1427 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1428 directory is unreadable.
1430 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1431 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1432 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1434 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1435 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1436 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1437 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1438 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1441 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1442 Before it would print nothing.
1444 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1446 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1447 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1448 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1449 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1450 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1451 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1452 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1453 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1455 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1459 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1460 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1461 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1463 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1464 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1465 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1466 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1469 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1473 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1474 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1475 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1476 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1477 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1478 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1479 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1481 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1482 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1483 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1484 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1485 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1486 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1487 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1488 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1490 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1491 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1492 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1495 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1499 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1500 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1502 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1503 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1504 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1506 ** Improved robustness
1508 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1509 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1510 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1513 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1517 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1518 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1519 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1520 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1521 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1523 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1527 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1530 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1534 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1535 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1536 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1537 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1539 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1540 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1542 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1543 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1544 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1547 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1549 ** Improved robustness
1551 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1552 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1554 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1555 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1556 or NFS-mounted partition.
1558 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1559 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1563 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1564 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1565 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1566 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1567 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1568 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1570 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1571 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1573 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1574 or neglect to report file removal.
1576 For the "groups" command:
1578 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1579 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1581 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1583 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1585 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1589 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1590 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1593 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1595 ** Changes in behavior
1597 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1598 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1599 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1600 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1602 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1603 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1604 a final `./' or `../' component.
1606 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1607 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1608 this only for pipes.
1610 ** Infrastructure changes
1612 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1613 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1614 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1615 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1619 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1620 name is "." or "..".
1622 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1623 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1624 dirent.d_type support.
1626 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1627 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1629 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1630 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1631 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1632 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1635 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1637 ** Changes in behavior
1639 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1643 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1644 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1648 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1649 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1650 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1652 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1653 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1655 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1656 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1658 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1660 ** Improved robustness
1662 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1663 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1664 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1666 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1667 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1670 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1671 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1673 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1674 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1676 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1677 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1679 ** Changes in behavior
1681 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1682 where the two are distinct.
1684 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1685 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1686 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1687 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1688 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1689 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1690 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1691 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1692 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1693 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1694 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1695 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1696 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1697 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1698 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1699 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1700 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1702 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1703 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1704 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1706 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1707 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1708 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1709 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1712 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1713 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1717 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1718 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1719 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1720 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1722 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1723 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1724 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1726 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1727 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1728 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1729 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1730 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1733 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1734 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1736 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1737 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1738 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1739 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1741 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1742 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1743 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1745 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1746 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1747 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1748 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1750 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1751 and sticky) with the -m option.
1753 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1754 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1755 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1756 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1757 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1759 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1760 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1762 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1766 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1767 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1768 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1769 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1771 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1773 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1775 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1776 silently ignoring one of them.
1778 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1779 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1780 containing this change was 5.92.
1782 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1783 automatically newline terminated.
1785 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1786 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1787 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1788 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1791 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1792 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1793 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1796 ** Scheduled for removal
1798 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1799 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1801 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1802 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1803 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1804 command to unlink a directory.
1806 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1807 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1808 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1809 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1813 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1814 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1815 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1816 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1817 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1818 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1822 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1823 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1825 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1827 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1828 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1829 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1831 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1832 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1835 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1836 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1838 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1839 list directories before files.
1841 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1842 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1843 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1844 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1847 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1849 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1851 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1852 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1853 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1855 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1856 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1860 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1861 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1862 usually printing nothing.
1864 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1866 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1867 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1868 them with hard-linked directories.
1870 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1871 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1872 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1874 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1875 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1876 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1878 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1881 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1882 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1884 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1885 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1887 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1888 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1890 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1891 all command-line arguments.
1893 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1895 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1897 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1898 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1900 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1902 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1903 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1904 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1905 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1906 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1908 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1909 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1911 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1912 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1913 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1914 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1916 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1918 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1922 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1923 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1925 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1926 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1928 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1929 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1931 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1932 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1934 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1935 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1937 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1939 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1940 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1941 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1944 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1946 ** Build-related bug fixes
1948 installing .mo files would fail
1951 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1955 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1957 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1960 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1964 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1965 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1969 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1971 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1972 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1974 ** Deprecated options
1976 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1977 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1979 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1983 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1985 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1986 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1987 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1988 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1990 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1993 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1999 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2004 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2006 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2008 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2009 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2010 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2012 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2013 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2014 problematic usages. These include:
2016 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2017 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2018 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2019 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2020 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2021 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2022 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2023 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2024 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2026 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2027 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2029 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2030 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2031 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2032 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2034 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2035 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2036 between binary and text files.
2038 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2042 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2046 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2047 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2049 head tac tail tee tr
2050 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2052 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2053 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2055 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2056 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2057 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2059 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2061 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2063 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2064 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2065 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2069 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2071 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2072 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2074 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2075 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2076 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2080 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2081 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2085 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2086 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2087 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2091 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2092 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2096 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2098 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2100 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2104 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2105 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2106 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2108 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2109 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2110 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2111 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2112 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2114 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2118 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2119 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2120 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2122 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2124 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2125 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2126 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2127 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2129 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2131 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2132 rather than silently wrapping around.
2134 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2135 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2137 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2138 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2140 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2141 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2142 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2143 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2145 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2147 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2149 ** Improved robustness
2151 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2152 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2153 no matter how large the result.
2155 ** Improved portability
2157 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2158 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2160 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2162 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2163 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2164 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2166 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2167 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2171 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2172 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2174 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2176 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2177 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2178 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2179 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2181 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2182 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2184 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2185 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2186 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2188 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2190 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2191 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2193 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2194 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2196 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2198 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2199 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2201 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2202 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2204 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2205 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2206 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2208 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2210 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2212 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2216 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2218 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2219 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2220 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2222 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2223 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2225 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2226 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2227 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2229 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2230 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2232 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2233 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2234 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2235 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2237 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2238 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2240 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2241 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2242 the file system does not support it.
2244 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2246 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2247 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2249 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2251 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2252 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2254 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2255 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2256 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2257 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2259 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2260 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2263 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2264 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2265 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2266 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2268 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2269 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2270 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2271 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2273 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2274 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2276 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2278 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2279 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2280 reporting incorrect results.
2284 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2285 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2287 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2290 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2292 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2293 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2295 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2296 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2298 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2301 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2302 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2303 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2304 the file name does not look like a page range.
2306 printf has several changes:
2308 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2309 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2311 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2312 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2313 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2315 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2316 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2319 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2320 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2322 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2323 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2325 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2327 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2328 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2330 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2332 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2334 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2335 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2336 when first encountering the directory.
2340 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2341 output; POSIX requires this.
2343 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2344 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2346 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2348 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2349 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2351 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2352 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2354 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2355 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2356 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2357 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2358 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2359 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2360 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2362 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2363 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2364 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2366 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2367 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2369 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2371 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2373 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2374 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2375 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2376 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2378 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2382 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2383 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2384 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2385 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2386 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2388 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2389 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2390 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2392 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2393 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2395 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2396 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2398 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2399 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2400 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2401 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2402 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2404 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2405 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2407 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2408 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2410 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2412 nocreat do not create the output file
2413 excl fail if the output file already exists
2414 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2415 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2417 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2419 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2420 direct use direct I/O for data
2421 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2422 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2423 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2424 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2425 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2427 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2429 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2430 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2433 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2434 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2435 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2436 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2437 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2438 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2440 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2441 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2443 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2446 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2448 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2450 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2451 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2453 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2454 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2455 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2457 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2458 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2459 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2461 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2463 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2464 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2466 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2467 for compatibility with bash.
2469 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2471 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2472 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2473 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2474 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2476 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2477 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2479 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2480 ls supports TABSIZE.
2481 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2482 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2483 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2485 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2488 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2490 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2491 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2492 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2493 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2494 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2495 an offset, not as a file name.
2497 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2498 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2500 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2501 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2503 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2504 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2506 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2507 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2508 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2510 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2511 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2513 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2514 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2518 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2520 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2522 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2526 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2527 or more arguments between partitions.
2529 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2530 holes in the destination.
2532 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2533 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2534 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2535 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2536 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2537 terminates immediately.
2539 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2541 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2543 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2544 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2545 not the empty string.
2547 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2548 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2552 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2553 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2554 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2557 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2564 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2568 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2569 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2571 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2572 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2574 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2575 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2576 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2579 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2583 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2584 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2586 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2587 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2589 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2590 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2591 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2593 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2595 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2598 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2600 ** Configuration option
2602 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2603 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2607 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2608 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2612 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2613 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2614 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2617 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2618 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2619 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2620 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2621 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2622 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2623 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2626 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2630 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2631 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2632 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2634 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2635 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2637 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2639 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2640 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2641 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2642 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2644 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2646 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2647 not just the ones that reference directories
2649 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2650 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2652 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2653 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2654 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2656 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2657 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2658 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2659 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2660 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2661 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2663 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2668 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2669 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2671 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2673 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2675 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2677 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2678 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2680 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2681 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2683 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2685 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2689 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2691 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2693 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2694 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2695 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2696 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2697 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2699 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2700 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2702 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2703 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2705 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2706 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2708 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2709 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2710 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2714 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2715 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2716 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2717 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2718 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2719 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2720 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2721 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2722 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2723 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2724 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2725 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2726 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2727 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2729 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2731 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2732 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2734 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2736 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2738 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2739 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2741 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2743 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2744 without a trailing newline.
2746 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2747 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2749 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2752 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2756 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2758 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2760 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2761 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2762 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2763 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2765 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2767 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2768 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2769 be printed without leading spaces.
2771 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2772 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2777 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2778 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2779 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2781 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2783 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2784 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2786 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2787 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2789 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2790 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2792 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2794 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2796 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2798 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2799 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2801 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2803 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2805 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2806 byte offsets are specified.
2809 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2812 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2815 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2816 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2817 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2818 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2819 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2820 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2821 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2822 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2823 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2824 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2825 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2826 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2827 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2828 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2829 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2830 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2831 directory where M has write access.
2832 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2833 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2834 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2837 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2838 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2839 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2840 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2841 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2842 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2843 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2844 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2845 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2846 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2847 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2848 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2849 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2850 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2851 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2852 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2853 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2854 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2855 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2856 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2857 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2858 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2859 appeared one additional time.
2861 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2862 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2863 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2864 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2867 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2868 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2869 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2870 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2871 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2872 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2873 if there were more than 338.
2875 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2876 - false --help now exits nonzero
2879 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2880 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2881 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2882 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2885 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2886 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2887 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2888 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2889 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2892 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2893 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2894 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2895 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2896 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2897 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2898 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2901 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2902 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2903 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2904 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2905 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2906 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2908 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2909 under certain unusual conditions
2910 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2911 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2914 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2915 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2916 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2917 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2918 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2919 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2920 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2921 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2922 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2923 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2924 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2925 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2926 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2927 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2928 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2929 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2932 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2933 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2936 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2937 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2938 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2939 involving hard-linked directories
2940 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2941 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2942 character-special and block files
2945 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2946 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2947 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2948 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2949 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2950 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2951 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2952 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2953 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2955 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2956 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2957 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2958 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2959 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2960 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2961 specified on the command line.
2962 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2963 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2964 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2965 the first file untouched.
2966 * readlink: new program
2967 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2968 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2969 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2970 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2971 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2972 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2975 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2976 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2977 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2978 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2979 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2980 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2981 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2982 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2983 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2984 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2985 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2986 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2988 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2989 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2990 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2992 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2993 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2994 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2995 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2996 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2997 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2998 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2999 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3002 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3003 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3006 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3007 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3008 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3009 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3010 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3011 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3012 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3015 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3016 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3018 ========================================================================
3019 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3020 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3023 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3025 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3026 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3027 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3028 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3029 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3030 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3031 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3032 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3033 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3034 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3035 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3036 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3038 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3039 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3040 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3041 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3043 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3046 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3048 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3049 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3050 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3051 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3052 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3053 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3054 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3057 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3058 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3059 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3060 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3061 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3062 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3063 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3064 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3065 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3066 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3067 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3068 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3069 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3070 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3071 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3072 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3074 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3075 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3077 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3078 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3079 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3080 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3081 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3082 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3084 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3085 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3086 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3087 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3088 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3089 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3090 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3092 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3093 the source files in the following example:
3094 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3095 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3096 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3097 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3098 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3099 links between source files with --preserve=links
3100 * cp accepts new options:
3101 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3102 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3103 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3104 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3105 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3106 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3107 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3108 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3109 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3111 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3112 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3113 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3114 even though it's older than dest.
3115 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3116 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3117 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3118 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3119 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3121 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3122 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3123 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3124 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3125 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3126 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3127 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3129 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3130 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3131 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3133 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3134 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3135 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3136 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3137 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3138 This is the default.
3140 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3141 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3142 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3143 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3144 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3146 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3149 ========================================================================
3150 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3151 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3154 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3155 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3157 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3158 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3159 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3160 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3161 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3163 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3164 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3165 that specifies a non-directory
3168 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3169 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3170 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3171 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3172 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3173 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3174 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3175 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3176 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3177 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3178 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3179 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3180 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3181 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3182 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3183 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3184 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3185 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3186 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3187 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3188 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3189 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3190 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3191 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3193 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3194 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3195 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3197 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3199 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3200 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3202 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3203 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3204 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3205 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3206 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3208 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3209 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3210 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3211 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3212 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3214 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3216 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3217 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3218 * still more portability fixes
3219 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3220 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3222 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3224 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3226 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3228 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3229 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3230 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3231 there is any time remaining
3232 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3234 ========================================================================
3235 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3236 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3238 This package began as the union of the following:
3239 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3241 ========================================================================
3243 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3245 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3246 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3247 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3248 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3249 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3250 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.