1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
8 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
9 sha384sum and sha512sum.
13 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
14 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
15 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
16 eventually exits nonzero.
18 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
19 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
20 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
21 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
22 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
24 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
25 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
26 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
28 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
29 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
30 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
32 ** Changes in behavior
34 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
38 stat and tail work better with ZFS and VZFS. stat -f --format=%T now
39 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files
40 on those file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file system
41 types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
45 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
46 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
47 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
48 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
49 are run without following the instructions in README.
52 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
56 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
57 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
58 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
59 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
61 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
62 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
63 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
64 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
66 sort -u could read freed memory.
67 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
68 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
69 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
73 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
74 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
75 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
76 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
79 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
83 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
84 processes will not intersperse their output.
85 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
87 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
88 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
89 date: invalid date '\260'
90 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
92 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
93 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
94 lines output by df, can work reliably.
95 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
97 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
98 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
99 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
101 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
102 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
103 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
104 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
105 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
106 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
108 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
109 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
111 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
112 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
114 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
115 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
116 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
118 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
119 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
120 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
124 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
126 ** Changes in behavior
128 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
129 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
130 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
131 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
132 have any reason to include it here.
136 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
137 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
138 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
140 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
141 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
142 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
145 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
149 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
150 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
151 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
152 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
153 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
154 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
156 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
157 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
158 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
159 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
160 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
161 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
162 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
164 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
165 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
167 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
168 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
172 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
173 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
175 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
177 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
179 ** Changes in behavior
181 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
182 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
183 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
185 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
186 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
189 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
193 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
194 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
195 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
196 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
197 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
198 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
199 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
200 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
202 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
203 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
204 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
205 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
206 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
208 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
209 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
211 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
212 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
214 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
215 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
217 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
218 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
220 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
221 additional static suffix to output file names.
223 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
224 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
225 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
227 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
228 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
232 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
233 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
234 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
236 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
237 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
238 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
239 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
240 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
241 typically still point to one of the hard links.
243 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
244 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
245 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
246 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
247 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
249 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
250 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
251 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
252 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
256 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
257 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
258 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
260 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
261 instead of causing a usage failure.
263 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
266 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
270 realpath: print resolved file names.
274 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
275 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
277 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
278 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
280 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
281 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
282 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
283 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
284 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
285 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
287 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
288 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
289 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
291 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
292 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
293 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
295 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
296 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
297 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
298 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
299 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
301 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
303 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
304 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
306 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
307 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
308 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
310 ** Changes in behavior
312 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
313 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
314 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
315 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
316 usually-short referent instead.
318 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
319 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
320 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
321 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
324 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
328 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
329 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
330 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
332 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
333 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
335 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
336 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
340 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
341 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
343 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
344 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
345 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
346 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
348 ** Changes in behavior
350 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
351 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
352 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
356 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
357 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
358 only .tar.xz files is enough.
361 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
365 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
366 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
367 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
369 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
370 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
372 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
373 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
374 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
375 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
376 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
378 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
379 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
380 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
381 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
382 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
383 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
384 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
385 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
387 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
388 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
390 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
391 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
393 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
394 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
396 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
397 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
398 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
400 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
401 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
402 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
403 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
405 ** Changes in behavior
407 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
408 when -v or -c specified.
410 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
411 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
415 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
416 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
417 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
418 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
419 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
421 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
422 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
423 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
425 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
426 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
427 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
428 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
429 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
430 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
431 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
433 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
434 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
435 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
439 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
440 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
442 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
445 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
446 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
448 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
449 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
451 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
452 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
454 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
456 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
460 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
461 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
463 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
466 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
470 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
471 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
473 ** Changes in behavior
475 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
476 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
477 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
478 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
479 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
480 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
482 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
483 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
484 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
488 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
491 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
495 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
496 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
497 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
499 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
500 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
501 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
503 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
504 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
505 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
507 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
508 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
510 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
511 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
513 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
514 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
516 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
517 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
521 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
522 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
523 processed portion thereof.
525 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
526 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
528 ** Changes in behavior
530 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
531 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
532 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
534 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
535 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
536 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
538 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
539 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
541 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
542 Use --preserve-context instead.
544 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
547 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
551 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
552 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
553 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
554 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
555 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
557 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
558 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
560 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
561 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
562 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
564 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
565 reject file names invalid for that file system.
567 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
568 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
572 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
573 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
574 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
575 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
576 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
577 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
578 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
579 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
581 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
582 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
583 the same number of fields are output for each line.
585 ** Changes in behavior
587 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
588 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
589 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
592 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
596 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
597 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
598 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
601 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
605 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
606 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
608 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
609 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
611 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
612 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
614 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
615 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
616 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
617 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
619 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
620 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
622 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
623 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
624 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
626 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
628 ** Changes in behavior
630 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
631 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
632 to the number of available processors.
636 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
639 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
643 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
644 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
645 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
646 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
648 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
649 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
650 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
652 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
653 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
655 ** Changes in behavior
657 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
658 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
660 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
661 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
662 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
663 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
664 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
665 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
667 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
668 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
669 the same way as the others.
672 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
676 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
677 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
678 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
680 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
681 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
683 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
684 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
685 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
687 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
688 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
690 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
691 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
693 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
694 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
695 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
697 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
698 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
699 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
700 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
704 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
705 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
707 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
710 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
711 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
713 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
715 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
716 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
717 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
719 ** Changes in behavior
721 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
722 rather than its aliased target.
724 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
725 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
726 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
728 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
729 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
730 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
731 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
732 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
733 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
734 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
735 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
737 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
739 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
741 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
742 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
745 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
746 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
747 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
748 control like taskset for example.
750 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
752 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
753 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
754 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
755 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
756 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
757 includes %C when context information is available.
759 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
760 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
761 rather than a file system attribute.
763 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
764 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
765 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
766 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
768 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
769 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
770 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
772 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
773 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
774 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
777 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
781 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
782 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
784 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
786 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
787 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
789 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
790 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
791 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
792 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
794 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
795 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
796 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
800 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
801 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
803 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
804 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
805 duration after the initial signal was sent.
807 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
808 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
809 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
810 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
811 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
812 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
813 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
814 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
815 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
817 ** Changes in behavior
819 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
820 sequence when it would be a no-op.
822 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
823 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
826 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
830 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
831 of available processors, which may not have been the case
832 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
833 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
837 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
838 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
840 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
841 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
842 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
843 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
845 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
846 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
847 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
850 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
854 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
855 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
856 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
858 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
859 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
860 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
862 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
863 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
865 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
866 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
867 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
868 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
870 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
871 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
872 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
874 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
875 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
876 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
877 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
879 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
880 renamed-aside and then recreated.
881 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
883 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
884 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
885 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
886 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
888 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
889 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
890 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
892 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
893 processes will not intersperse their output.
894 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
897 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
901 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
902 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
904 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
905 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
907 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
908 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
909 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
910 the presence of the empty string argument.
911 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
913 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
914 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
915 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
916 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
918 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
919 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
921 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
922 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
923 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
925 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
926 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
927 and with a malicious user on the same system
928 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
929 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
932 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
936 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
937 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
938 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
940 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
941 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
942 offending directory and all "contents."
944 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
945 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
946 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
948 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
949 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
950 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
952 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
953 processes will not intersperse their output.
954 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
955 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
957 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
958 output the name of the file to stdout.
959 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
961 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
962 call fails with errno == EACCES.
963 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
965 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
966 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
969 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
970 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
971 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
973 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
974 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
975 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
976 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
977 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
978 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
980 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
981 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
982 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
983 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
985 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
986 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
988 ** Changes in behavior
990 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
991 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
992 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
993 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
994 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
996 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
997 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
998 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
999 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1001 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1003 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1004 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1005 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1006 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1007 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1011 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1015 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1016 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1018 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1019 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1021 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1022 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1023 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1025 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1026 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1029 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1033 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1034 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1035 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1037 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1038 to accommodate leap seconds.
1039 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1041 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1042 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1043 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1045 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1047 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1048 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1049 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1051 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1052 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1053 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1054 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1055 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1059 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1060 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1061 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1062 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1064 ** Changes in behavior
1066 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1067 environment variable is set.
1069 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1070 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1071 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1075 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1076 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1077 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1078 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1080 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1081 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1082 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1083 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1087 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1088 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1089 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1091 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1092 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1093 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1094 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1095 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1096 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1097 another improvement:
1099 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1100 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1103 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1107 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1108 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1109 and libraries tested at configure time.
1110 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1112 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1113 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1115 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1116 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1118 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1119 printing a summary to stderr.
1120 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1122 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1123 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1124 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1126 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1127 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1129 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1130 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1131 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1132 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1134 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1135 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1136 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1137 which is relatively unusual.
1138 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1140 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1141 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1142 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1143 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1144 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1145 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1146 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1150 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1151 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1152 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1153 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1154 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1158 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1159 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1161 ** Changes in behavior
1163 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1164 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1165 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1166 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1167 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1170 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1174 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1175 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1177 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1178 before data copying has started.
1180 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1181 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1183 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1184 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1185 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1186 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1188 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1189 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1190 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1191 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1193 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1198 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1199 for its standard streams.
1201 ** Changes in behavior
1203 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1204 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1205 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1206 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1207 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1208 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1210 ** Deprecated options
1212 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1213 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1217 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1219 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1220 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1221 a btrfs file system.
1223 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1225 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1226 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1228 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1229 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1232 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1236 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1237 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1238 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1239 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1241 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1242 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1243 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1244 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1245 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1250 make check: two tests have been corrected
1254 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1255 inherited from gnulib.
1258 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1262 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1263 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1264 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1265 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1267 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1268 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1270 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1272 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1273 systems without xattr support.
1275 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1276 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1277 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1279 ** Changes in behavior
1281 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1282 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1283 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1284 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1286 ** Improved robustness
1288 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1289 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1290 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1291 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1292 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1293 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1294 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1295 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1296 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1300 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1301 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1303 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1304 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1305 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1306 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1307 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1310 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1314 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1315 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1316 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1320 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1321 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1322 data was read, or on process exit.
1323 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1325 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1326 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1327 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1328 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1330 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1331 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1332 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1333 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1335 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1336 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1338 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1339 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1341 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1342 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1343 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1345 ** Changes in behavior
1347 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1348 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1349 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1351 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1352 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1354 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1355 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1356 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1359 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1363 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1365 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1366 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1367 install: Never copies xattrs
1369 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1370 from overwriting any existing destination file
1372 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1373 mode where this feature is available.
1375 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1376 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1377 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1378 do not modify the destination at all.
1380 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1382 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1386 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1387 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1389 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1391 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1392 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1394 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1395 processing the first file name
1397 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1398 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1399 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1400 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1402 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1403 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1405 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1406 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1409 ** Changes in behavior
1411 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1412 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1414 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1415 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1416 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1418 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1419 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1421 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1423 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1424 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1425 is still marked with a '+'.
1428 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1432 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1433 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1437 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1438 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1439 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1440 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1441 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1442 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1444 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1445 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1447 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1448 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1450 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1452 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1453 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1454 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1456 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1457 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1459 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1460 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1461 used to factor large numbers.
1463 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1466 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1468 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1470 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1471 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1473 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1474 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1475 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1476 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1478 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1479 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1480 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1482 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1483 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1487 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1489 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1490 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1492 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1493 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1495 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1497 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1498 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1502 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1503 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1504 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1506 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1508 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1509 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1510 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1512 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1513 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1514 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1516 ** Changes in behavior
1518 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1519 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1522 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1526 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1527 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1528 'futimens' system calls.
1532 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1534 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1535 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1536 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1538 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1539 with no USERNAME argument.
1541 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1542 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1543 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1545 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1546 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1547 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1548 number of fields for some inputs.
1550 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1551 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1553 ** Changes in behavior
1555 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1556 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1559 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1563 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1565 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1566 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1567 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1568 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1570 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1571 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1573 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1574 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1576 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1577 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1579 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1580 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1581 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1582 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1584 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1585 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1586 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1587 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1588 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1589 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1591 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1592 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1594 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1595 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1596 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1598 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1599 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1601 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1602 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1604 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1605 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1606 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1607 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1609 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1610 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1612 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1613 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1615 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1616 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1617 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1621 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1622 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1624 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1625 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1626 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1627 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1631 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1632 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1634 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1636 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1640 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1641 which have negative errno values.
1645 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1649 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1653 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1654 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1657 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1661 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1662 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1663 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1665 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1666 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1667 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1668 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1672 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1673 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1674 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1675 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1678 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1682 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1684 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1685 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1686 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1689 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1693 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1694 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1696 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1698 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1700 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1702 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1706 ** Changes in behavior
1708 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1709 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1711 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1712 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1714 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1715 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1716 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1720 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1721 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1722 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1723 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1724 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1725 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1726 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1727 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1728 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1729 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1730 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1732 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1733 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1734 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1737 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1740 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1741 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1742 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1744 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1745 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1746 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1749 ** New build options
1751 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1752 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1753 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1754 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1756 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1757 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1758 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1759 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1760 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1761 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1762 of "make check" fail.
1764 ** Remove deprecated options
1766 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1767 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1768 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1769 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1770 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1772 ** Improved robustness
1774 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1775 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1776 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1777 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1778 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1779 loss of the contents of a/f.
1781 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1782 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1786 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1787 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1788 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1790 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1791 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1792 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1793 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1795 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1796 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1797 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1798 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1799 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1800 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1801 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1802 destination is a symlink.
1804 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1806 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1807 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1809 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1810 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1812 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1814 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1815 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1817 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1818 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1820 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1823 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1824 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1826 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1827 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1829 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1830 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1831 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1832 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1834 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1835 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1836 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1838 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1839 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1840 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1842 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1843 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1844 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1845 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1847 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1848 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1849 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1851 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1852 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1854 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1855 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1857 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1859 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1860 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1861 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1863 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1864 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1866 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1867 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1869 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1870 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1872 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1873 [present in the original version]
1876 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1880 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1882 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1883 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1884 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1886 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1887 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1889 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1893 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1894 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1896 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1897 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1899 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1900 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1902 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1903 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1904 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1905 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1906 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1907 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1909 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1910 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1913 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1914 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1916 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1919 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1920 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1921 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1923 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1924 directory is unreadable.
1926 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1927 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1928 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1930 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1931 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1932 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1933 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1934 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1937 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1938 Before it would print nothing.
1940 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1942 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1943 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1944 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1945 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1946 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1947 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1948 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1949 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1951 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1955 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1956 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1957 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1959 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1960 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1961 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1962 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1965 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1969 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1970 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1971 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1972 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1973 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1974 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1975 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1977 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1978 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1979 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1980 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1981 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1982 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1983 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1984 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1986 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1987 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1988 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1991 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1995 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1996 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1998 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1999 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2000 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2002 ** Improved robustness
2004 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2005 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2006 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2009 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2013 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2014 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2015 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2016 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2017 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2019 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2023 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2026 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2030 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2031 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2032 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2033 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2035 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2036 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2038 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2039 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2040 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2043 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2045 ** Improved robustness
2047 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2048 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2050 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2051 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2052 or NFS-mounted partition.
2054 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2055 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2059 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2060 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2061 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2062 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2063 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2064 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2066 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2067 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2069 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2070 or neglect to report file removal.
2072 For the "groups" command:
2074 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2075 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2077 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2079 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2081 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2085 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2086 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2089 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2091 ** Changes in behavior
2093 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2094 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2095 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2096 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2098 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2099 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2100 a final './' or '../' component.
2102 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2103 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2104 this only for pipes.
2106 ** Infrastructure changes
2108 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2109 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2110 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2111 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2115 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2116 name is "." or "..".
2118 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2119 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2120 dirent.d_type support.
2122 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2123 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2125 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2126 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2127 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2128 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2131 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2133 ** Changes in behavior
2135 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2139 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2140 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2144 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2145 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2146 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2148 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2149 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2151 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2152 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2154 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2156 ** Improved robustness
2158 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2159 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2160 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2162 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2163 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2166 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2167 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2169 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2170 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2172 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2173 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2175 ** Changes in behavior
2177 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2178 where the two are distinct.
2180 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2181 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2182 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2183 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2184 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2185 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2186 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2187 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2188 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2189 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2190 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2191 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2192 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2193 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2194 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2195 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2196 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2198 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2199 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2200 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2202 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2203 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2204 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2205 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2208 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2209 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2213 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2214 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2215 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2216 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2218 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2219 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2220 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2222 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2223 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2224 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2225 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2226 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2229 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2230 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2232 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2233 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2234 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2235 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2237 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2238 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2239 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2241 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2242 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2243 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2244 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2246 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2247 and sticky) with the -m option.
2249 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2250 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2251 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2252 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2253 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2255 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2256 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2258 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2262 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2263 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2264 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2265 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2267 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2269 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2271 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2272 silently ignoring one of them.
2274 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2275 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2276 containing this change was 5.92.
2278 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2279 automatically newline terminated.
2281 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2282 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2283 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2284 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2287 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2288 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2289 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2292 ** Scheduled for removal
2294 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2295 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2297 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2298 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2299 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2300 command to unlink a directory.
2302 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2303 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2304 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2305 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2309 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2310 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2311 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2312 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2313 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2314 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2318 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2319 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2321 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2323 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2324 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2325 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2327 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2328 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2331 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2332 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2334 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2335 list directories before files.
2337 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2338 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2339 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2340 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2343 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2345 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2347 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2348 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2349 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2351 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2352 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2356 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2357 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2358 usually printing nothing.
2360 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2362 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2363 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2364 them with hard-linked directories.
2366 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2367 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2368 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2370 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2371 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2372 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2374 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2377 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2378 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2380 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2381 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2383 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2384 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2386 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2387 all command-line arguments.
2389 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2391 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2393 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2394 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2396 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2398 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2399 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2400 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2401 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2402 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2404 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2405 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2407 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2408 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2409 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2410 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2412 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2414 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2418 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2419 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2421 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2422 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2424 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2425 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2427 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2428 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2430 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2431 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2433 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2435 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2436 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2437 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2440 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2442 ** Build-related bug fixes
2444 installing .mo files would fail
2447 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2451 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2453 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2456 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2460 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2461 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2465 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2467 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2468 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2470 ** Deprecated options
2472 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2473 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2475 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2479 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2481 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2482 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2483 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2484 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2486 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2489 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2495 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2500 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2502 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2504 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2505 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2506 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2508 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2509 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2510 problematic usages. These include:
2512 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2513 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2514 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2515 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2516 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2517 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2518 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2519 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2520 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2522 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2523 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2525 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2526 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2527 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2528 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2530 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2531 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2532 between binary and text files.
2534 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2538 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2542 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2543 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2545 head tac tail tee tr
2546 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2548 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2549 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2551 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2552 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2553 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2555 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2557 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2559 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2560 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2561 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2565 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2567 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2568 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2570 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2571 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2572 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2576 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2577 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2581 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2582 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2583 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2587 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2588 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2592 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2594 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2596 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2600 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2601 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2602 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2604 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2605 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2606 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2607 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2608 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2610 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2614 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2615 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2616 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2618 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2620 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2621 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2622 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2623 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2625 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2627 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2628 rather than silently wrapping around.
2630 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2631 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2633 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2634 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2636 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2637 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2638 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2639 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2641 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2643 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2645 ** Improved robustness
2647 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2648 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2649 no matter how large the result.
2651 ** Improved portability
2653 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2654 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2656 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2658 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2659 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2660 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2662 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2663 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2667 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2668 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2670 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2672 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2673 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2674 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2675 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2677 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2678 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2680 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2681 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2682 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2684 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2686 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2687 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2689 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2690 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2692 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2694 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2695 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2697 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2698 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2700 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2701 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2702 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2704 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2706 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2708 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2712 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2714 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2715 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2716 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2718 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2719 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2721 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2722 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2723 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2725 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2726 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2728 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2729 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2730 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2731 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2733 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2734 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2736 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2737 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2738 the file system does not support it.
2740 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2742 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2743 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2745 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2747 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2748 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2750 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2751 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2752 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2753 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2755 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2756 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2759 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2760 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2761 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2762 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2764 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2765 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2766 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2767 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2769 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2770 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2772 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2774 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2775 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2776 reporting incorrect results.
2780 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2781 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2783 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2786 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2788 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2789 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2791 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2792 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2794 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2797 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2798 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2799 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2800 the file name does not look like a page range.
2802 printf has several changes:
2804 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2805 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2807 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2808 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2809 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2811 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2812 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2815 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2816 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2818 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2819 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2821 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2823 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2824 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2826 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2828 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2830 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2831 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2832 when first encountering the directory.
2836 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2837 output; POSIX requires this.
2839 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2840 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2842 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2844 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2845 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2847 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2848 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2850 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2851 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2852 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2853 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2854 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2855 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2856 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2858 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2859 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2860 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2862 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2863 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2865 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2867 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2869 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2870 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2871 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2872 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2874 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2878 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2879 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2880 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2881 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
2882 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
2884 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2885 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2886 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2888 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2889 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2891 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2892 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2894 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2895 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2896 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2897 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2898 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2900 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2901 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2903 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2904 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2906 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2908 nocreat do not create the output file
2909 excl fail if the output file already exists
2910 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2911 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2913 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2915 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2916 direct use direct I/O for data
2917 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2918 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2919 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2920 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2921 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2923 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2925 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2926 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
2929 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2930 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2931 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2932 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2933 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2934 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2936 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2937 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2939 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2942 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2944 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2946 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2947 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2949 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2950 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2951 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2953 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2954 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2955 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2957 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2959 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2960 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2962 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2963 for compatibility with bash.
2965 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2967 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2968 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2969 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2970 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2972 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2973 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2975 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2976 ls supports TABSIZE.
2977 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2978 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2979 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2981 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2984 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2986 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2987 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2988 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2989 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2990 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2991 an offset, not as a file name.
2993 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2994 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2996 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2997 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2999 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3000 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3002 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3003 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3004 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3006 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3007 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3009 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3010 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3014 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3016 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3018 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3022 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3023 or more arguments between partitions.
3025 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3026 holes in the destination.
3028 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3029 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3030 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3031 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3032 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3033 terminates immediately.
3035 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3037 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3039 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3040 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3041 not the empty string.
3043 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3044 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3048 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3049 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3050 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3053 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3060 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3064 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3065 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3067 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3068 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3070 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3071 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3072 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3075 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3079 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3080 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3082 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3083 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3085 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3086 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3087 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3089 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3091 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3094 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3096 ** Configuration option
3098 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3099 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3103 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3104 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3108 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3109 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3110 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3113 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3114 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3115 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3116 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3117 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3118 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3119 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3122 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3126 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3127 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3128 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3130 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3131 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3133 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3135 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3136 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3137 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3138 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3140 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3142 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3143 not just the ones that reference directories
3145 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3146 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3148 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3149 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3150 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3152 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3153 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3154 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3155 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3156 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3157 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3159 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3164 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3165 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3167 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3169 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3171 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3173 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3174 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3176 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3177 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3179 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3181 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3185 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3187 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3189 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3190 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3191 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3192 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3193 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3195 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3196 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3198 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3199 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3201 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3202 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3204 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3205 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3206 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3210 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3211 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3212 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3213 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3214 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3215 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3216 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3217 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3218 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3219 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3220 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3221 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3222 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3223 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3225 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3227 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3228 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3230 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3232 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3234 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3235 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3237 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3239 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3240 without a trailing newline.
3242 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3243 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3245 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3248 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3252 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3254 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3256 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3257 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3258 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3259 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3261 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3263 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3264 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3265 be printed without leading spaces.
3267 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3268 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3273 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3274 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3275 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3277 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3279 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3280 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3282 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3283 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3285 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3286 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3288 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3290 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3292 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3294 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3295 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3297 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3299 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3301 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3302 byte offsets are specified.
3305 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3308 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3311 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3312 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3313 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3314 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3315 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3316 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3317 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3318 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3319 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3320 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3321 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3322 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3323 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3324 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3325 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3326 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3327 directory where M has write access.
3328 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3329 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3330 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3333 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3334 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3335 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3336 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3337 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3338 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3339 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3340 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3341 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3342 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3343 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3344 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3345 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3346 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3347 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3348 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3349 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3350 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3351 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3352 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3353 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3354 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3355 appeared one additional time.
3357 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3358 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3359 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3360 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3363 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3364 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3365 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3366 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3367 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3368 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3369 if there were more than 338.
3371 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3372 - false --help now exits nonzero
3375 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3376 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3377 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3378 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3381 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3382 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3383 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3384 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3385 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3388 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3389 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3390 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3391 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3392 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3393 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3394 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3397 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3398 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3399 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3400 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3401 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3402 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3404 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3405 under certain unusual conditions
3406 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3407 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3410 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3411 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3412 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3413 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3414 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3415 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3416 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3417 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3418 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3419 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3420 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3421 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3422 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3423 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3424 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3425 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3428 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3429 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3432 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3433 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3434 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3435 involving hard-linked directories
3436 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3437 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3438 character-special and block files
3441 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3442 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3443 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3444 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3445 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3446 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3447 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3448 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3449 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3451 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3452 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3453 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3454 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3455 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3456 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3457 specified on the command line.
3458 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3459 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3460 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3461 the first file untouched.
3462 * readlink: new program
3463 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3464 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3465 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3466 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3467 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3468 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3471 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3472 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3473 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3474 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3475 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3476 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3477 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3478 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3479 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3480 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3481 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3482 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3484 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3485 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3486 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3488 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3489 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3490 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3491 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3492 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3493 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3494 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3495 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3498 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3499 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3502 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3503 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3504 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3505 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3506 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3507 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3508 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3511 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3512 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3514 ========================================================================
3515 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3516 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3519 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3521 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3522 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3523 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3524 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3525 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3526 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3527 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3528 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3529 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3530 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3531 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3532 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3534 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3535 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3536 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3537 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3539 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3542 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3544 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3545 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3546 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3547 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3548 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3549 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3550 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3553 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3554 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3555 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3556 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3557 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3558 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3559 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3560 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3561 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3562 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3563 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3564 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3565 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3566 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3567 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3568 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3570 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3571 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3573 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3574 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3575 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3576 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3577 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3578 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3580 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3581 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3582 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3583 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3584 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3585 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3586 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3588 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3589 the source files in the following example:
3590 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3591 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3592 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3593 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3594 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3595 links between source files with --preserve=links
3596 * cp accepts new options:
3597 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3598 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3599 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3600 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3601 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3602 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3603 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3604 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3605 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3607 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3608 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3609 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3610 even though it's older than dest.
3611 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3612 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3613 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3614 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3615 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3617 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3618 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3619 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3620 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3621 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3622 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3623 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3625 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3626 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3627 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3629 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3630 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3631 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3632 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3633 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3634 This is the default.
3636 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3637 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3638 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3639 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3640 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3642 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3645 ========================================================================
3646 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3647 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3650 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3651 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3653 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3654 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3655 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3656 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3657 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3659 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3660 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3661 that specifies a non-directory
3664 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3665 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3666 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3667 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3668 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3669 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3670 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3671 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3672 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3673 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3674 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3675 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3676 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3677 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3678 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3679 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3680 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3681 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3682 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3683 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3684 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3685 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3686 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3687 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3689 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3690 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3691 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3693 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3695 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3696 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3698 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3699 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3700 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3701 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3702 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3704 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3705 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3706 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3707 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3708 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3710 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3712 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3713 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3714 * still more portability fixes
3715 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3716 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3718 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3720 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3722 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3724 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3725 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3726 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3727 there is any time remaining
3728 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3730 ========================================================================
3731 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3732 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3734 This package began as the union of the following:
3735 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3737 ========================================================================
3739 Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3741 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3742 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3743 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3744 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3745 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3746 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.