1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9+ (????-??-??) [stable]
7 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
8 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
10 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
12 ** Programs no longer installed by default
16 ** Changes in behavior
18 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
19 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
21 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
22 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
23 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
27 Add SELinux support (FIXME: add details here)
29 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
30 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
31 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
33 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
34 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
35 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
40 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
41 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
42 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
43 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
45 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
46 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
47 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
48 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
49 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
50 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
53 ** Remove deprecated options
55 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
56 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
57 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
58 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
59 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
61 ** Improved robustness
63 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
64 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
65 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
66 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
67 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
68 loss of the contents of a/f.
70 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
71 in its 35-colon commmand-line argument
75 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
76 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
77 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
79 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
80 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
81 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
82 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
84 cp no longer fails to write through a dangling symlink
85 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]. cp --parents no
86 longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file name
87 components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b
88 d" no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a
89 destination symlink to be the same as the referenced file when
90 copying links or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink
91 to FILE, "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently
92 doing nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when
93 the destination is a symlink.
95 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
97 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
98 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
100 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
101 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
103 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
105 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
106 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
108 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
111 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
112 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
114 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
115 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
117 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
118 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
119 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
120 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
122 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
123 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
124 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
126 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
127 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
128 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
130 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
131 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
132 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
133 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
135 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
136 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
138 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
139 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
140 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
142 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
143 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
145 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
146 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
148 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
149 complement of Set1. [introduced with the original version, in 1992]
152 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
156 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
158 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
159 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
160 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
162 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
163 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
165 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
169 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
170 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
172 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
173 support but with insufficient /proc support.
175 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
176 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
178 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
179 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
180 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
181 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
182 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
183 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
185 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
186 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
189 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
190 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
192 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
195 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
196 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
197 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
199 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
200 directory is unreadable.
202 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
203 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
204 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
206 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
207 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
208 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
209 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
210 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
213 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
214 Before it would print nothing.
216 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
218 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
219 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
220 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
221 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
222 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
223 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
224 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
225 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
227 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
231 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
232 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
233 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
235 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
236 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
237 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
238 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
241 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
245 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
246 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
247 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
248 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
249 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
250 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
251 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
253 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
254 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
255 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
256 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
257 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
258 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
259 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
260 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
262 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
263 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
264 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
267 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
271 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
272 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
274 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
275 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
276 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
278 ** Improved robustness
280 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
281 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
282 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
285 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
289 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
290 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
291 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
292 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
293 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
295 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
299 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
302 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
306 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
307 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
308 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
309 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
311 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
312 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
314 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
315 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
316 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
319 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
321 ** Improved robustness
323 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
324 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
326 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
327 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
328 or NFS-mounted partition.
330 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
331 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
335 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
336 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
337 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
338 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
339 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
340 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
342 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
343 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
345 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
346 or neglect to report file removal.
348 For the "groups" command:
350 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
351 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
353 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
355 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
357 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
361 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
362 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
365 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
367 ** Changes in behavior
369 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
370 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
371 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
372 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
374 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
375 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
376 a final `./' or `../' component.
378 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
379 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
382 ** Infrastructure changes
384 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
385 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
386 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
387 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
391 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
394 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
395 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
396 dirent.d_type support.
398 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
399 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
401 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
402 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
403 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
404 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
407 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
409 ** Changes in behavior
411 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
415 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
416 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
420 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
421 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
422 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
424 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
425 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
427 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
428 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
430 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
432 ** Improved robustness
434 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
435 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
436 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
438 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
439 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
442 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
443 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
445 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
446 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
448 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
449 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
451 ** Changes in behavior
453 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
454 where the two are distinct.
456 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
457 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
458 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
459 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
460 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
461 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
462 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
463 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
464 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
465 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
466 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
467 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
468 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
469 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
470 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
471 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
472 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
474 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
475 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
476 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
478 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
479 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
480 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
481 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
484 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
485 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
489 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
490 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
491 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
492 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
494 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
495 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
496 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
498 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
499 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
500 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
501 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
502 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
505 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
506 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
508 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
509 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
510 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
511 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
513 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
514 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
515 successful and the output is easier to parse.
517 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
518 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
519 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
520 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
522 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
523 and sticky) with the -m option.
525 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
526 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
527 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
528 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
529 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
531 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
532 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
534 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
538 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
539 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
540 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
541 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
543 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
545 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
547 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
548 silently ignoring one of them.
550 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
551 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
552 containing this change was 5.92.
554 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
555 automatically newline terminated.
557 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
558 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
559 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
560 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
563 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
564 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
565 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
568 ** Scheduled for removal
570 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
571 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
573 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
574 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
575 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
576 command to unlink a directory.
578 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
579 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
580 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
581 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
585 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
586 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
587 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
588 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
589 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
590 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
594 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
595 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
597 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
599 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
600 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
601 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
603 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
604 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
607 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
608 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
610 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
611 list directories before files.
613 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
614 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
615 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
616 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
619 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
621 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
623 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
624 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
625 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
627 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
628 list of NUL-terminated file names.
632 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
633 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
634 usually printing nothing.
636 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
638 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
639 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
640 them with hard-linked directories.
642 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
643 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
644 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
646 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
647 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
648 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
650 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
653 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
654 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
656 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
657 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
659 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
660 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
662 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
663 all command-line arguments.
665 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
667 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
669 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
670 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
672 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
674 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
675 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
676 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
677 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
678 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
680 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
681 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
683 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
684 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
685 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
686 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
688 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
690 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
694 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
695 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
697 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
698 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
700 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
701 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
703 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
704 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
706 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
707 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
709 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
711 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
712 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
713 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
716 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
718 ** Build-related bug fixes
720 installing .mo files would fail
723 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
727 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
729 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
732 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
736 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
737 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
741 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
743 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
744 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
746 ** Deprecated options
748 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
749 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
751 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
755 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
757 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
758 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
759 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
760 conforming to older POSIX versions.
762 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
765 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
771 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
776 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
778 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
780 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
781 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
782 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
784 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
785 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
786 problematic usages. These include:
788 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
789 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
790 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
791 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
792 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
793 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
794 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
795 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
796 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
798 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
799 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
801 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
802 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
803 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
804 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
806 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
807 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
808 between binary and text files.
810 The following programs now always use text input/output:
814 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
818 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
819 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
822 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
824 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
825 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
827 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
828 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
829 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
831 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
833 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
835 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
836 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
837 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
841 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
843 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
844 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
846 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
847 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
848 blocks until F contains N blocks.
852 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
853 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
857 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
858 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
859 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
863 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
864 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
868 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
870 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
872 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
876 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
877 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
878 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
880 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
881 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
882 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
883 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
884 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
886 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
890 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
891 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
892 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
894 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
896 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
897 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
898 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
899 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
901 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
903 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
904 rather than silently wrapping around.
906 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
907 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
909 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
910 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
912 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
913 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
914 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
917 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
919 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
921 ** Improved robustness
923 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
924 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
925 no matter how large the result.
927 ** Improved portability
929 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
930 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
932 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
934 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
935 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
936 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
938 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
939 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
943 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
944 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
946 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
948 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
949 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
950 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
951 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
953 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
954 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
956 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
957 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
958 categories if not specified by dircolors.
960 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
962 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
963 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
965 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
966 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
968 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
970 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
971 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
973 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
974 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
976 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
977 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
978 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
980 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
982 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
984 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
988 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
990 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
991 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
992 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
994 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
995 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
997 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
998 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
999 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
1001 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
1002 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
1004 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
1005 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
1006 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
1007 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
1009 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
1010 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
1012 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
1013 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
1014 the file system does not support it.
1016 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
1018 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
1019 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
1021 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
1023 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
1024 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
1026 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
1027 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
1028 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
1029 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
1031 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
1032 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
1035 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
1036 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
1037 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
1038 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
1040 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
1041 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
1042 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
1043 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
1045 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
1046 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
1048 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
1050 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
1051 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
1052 reporting incorrect results.
1056 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
1057 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
1059 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
1062 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
1064 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
1065 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
1067 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
1068 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
1070 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
1073 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
1074 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
1075 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
1076 the file name does not look like a page range.
1078 printf has several changes:
1080 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
1081 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
1083 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
1084 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
1085 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
1087 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
1088 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
1091 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
1092 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
1094 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
1095 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
1097 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
1099 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
1100 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
1102 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
1104 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
1106 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
1107 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
1108 when first encountering the directory.
1112 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
1113 output; POSIX requires this.
1115 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
1116 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
1118 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
1120 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
1121 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
1123 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
1124 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
1126 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
1127 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
1128 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
1129 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
1130 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
1131 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
1132 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
1134 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
1135 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
1136 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
1138 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
1139 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
1141 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
1143 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
1145 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
1146 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
1147 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
1148 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
1150 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
1154 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
1155 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
1156 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
1157 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
1158 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
1160 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
1161 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
1162 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
1164 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
1165 is longer than PATH_MAX.
1167 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
1168 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
1170 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
1171 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
1172 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
1173 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
1174 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
1176 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
1177 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
1179 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
1180 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
1182 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
1184 nocreat do not create the output file
1185 excl fail if the output file already exists
1186 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
1187 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
1189 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
1191 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
1192 direct use direct I/O for data
1193 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
1194 sync likewise, but also for metadata
1195 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
1196 nofollow do not follow symlinks
1197 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
1199 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
1201 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
1202 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
1205 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
1206 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
1207 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
1208 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
1209 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
1210 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
1212 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1213 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1215 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
1218 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
1220 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
1222 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
1223 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
1225 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
1226 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
1227 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
1229 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
1230 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
1231 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
1233 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
1235 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
1236 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
1238 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
1239 for compatibility with bash.
1241 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
1243 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
1244 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
1245 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
1246 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
1248 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
1249 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
1251 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
1252 ls supports TABSIZE.
1253 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
1254 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
1255 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
1257 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
1260 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
1262 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
1263 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
1264 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
1265 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
1266 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
1267 an offset, not as a file name.
1269 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
1270 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
1272 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
1273 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
1275 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
1276 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
1278 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
1279 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
1280 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
1282 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
1283 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
1285 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
1286 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
1290 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
1292 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
1294 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
1298 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
1299 or more arguments between partitions.
1301 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
1302 holes in the destination.
1304 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
1305 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
1306 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
1307 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
1308 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
1309 terminates immediately.
1311 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
1313 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
1315 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
1316 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
1317 not the empty string.
1319 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
1320 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
1324 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
1325 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
1326 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
1329 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
1336 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
1340 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
1341 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
1343 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
1344 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
1346 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
1347 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
1348 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
1351 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
1355 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
1356 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
1358 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
1359 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
1361 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
1362 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
1363 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
1365 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
1367 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
1370 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
1372 ** Configuration option
1374 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
1375 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
1379 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
1380 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
1384 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
1385 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
1386 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
1389 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
1390 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
1391 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
1392 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
1393 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
1394 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
1395 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
1398 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
1402 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
1403 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
1404 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
1406 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
1407 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
1409 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
1411 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
1412 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
1413 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
1414 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
1416 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
1418 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
1419 not just the ones that reference directories
1421 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
1422 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
1424 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
1425 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
1426 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
1428 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
1429 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
1430 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
1431 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
1432 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
1433 ragged when a datum was too wide.
1435 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
1440 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
1441 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
1443 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
1445 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
1447 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
1449 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
1450 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
1452 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
1453 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
1455 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
1457 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
1461 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
1463 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
1465 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
1466 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
1467 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
1468 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
1469 resolution is the best we can do right now.
1471 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
1472 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
1474 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
1475 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
1477 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
1478 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
1480 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
1481 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
1482 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
1486 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
1487 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
1488 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
1489 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
1490 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
1491 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
1492 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
1493 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
1494 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
1495 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
1496 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
1497 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
1498 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
1499 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
1501 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
1503 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
1504 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
1506 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
1508 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
1510 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
1511 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
1513 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
1515 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
1516 without a trailing newline.
1518 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
1519 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
1521 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
1524 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
1528 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
1530 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
1532 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
1533 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
1534 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
1535 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
1537 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
1539 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
1540 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
1541 be printed without leading spaces.
1543 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
1544 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
1549 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
1550 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
1551 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
1553 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
1555 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
1556 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
1558 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
1559 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
1561 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
1562 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
1564 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
1566 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
1568 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
1570 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
1571 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
1573 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
1575 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
1577 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
1578 byte offsets are specified.
1581 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
1584 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
1587 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
1588 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
1589 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
1590 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
1591 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
1592 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
1593 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
1594 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
1595 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
1596 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
1597 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
1598 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
1599 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
1600 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
1601 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
1602 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
1603 directory where M has write access.
1604 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
1605 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
1606 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
1609 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
1610 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
1611 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
1612 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
1613 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
1614 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
1615 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
1616 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
1617 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
1618 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
1619 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
1620 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
1621 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
1622 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
1623 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
1624 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
1625 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
1626 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
1627 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
1628 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
1629 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
1630 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
1631 appeared one additional time.
1633 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
1634 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
1635 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
1636 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
1639 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
1640 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
1641 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
1642 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
1643 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
1644 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
1645 if there were more than 338.
1647 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
1648 - false --help now exits nonzero
1651 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
1652 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
1653 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
1654 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
1657 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
1658 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
1659 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
1660 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
1661 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
1664 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
1665 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
1666 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
1667 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
1668 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
1669 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
1670 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
1673 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
1674 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
1675 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
1676 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
1677 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
1678 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
1680 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
1681 under certain unusual conditions
1682 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
1683 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
1686 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
1687 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
1688 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
1689 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
1690 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
1691 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
1692 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
1693 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
1694 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
1695 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
1696 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
1697 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
1698 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
1699 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
1700 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
1701 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
1704 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
1705 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
1708 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
1709 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
1710 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
1711 involving hard-linked directories
1712 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
1713 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
1714 character-special and block files
1717 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
1718 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
1719 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
1720 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
1721 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
1722 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
1723 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
1724 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
1725 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
1727 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
1728 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
1729 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
1730 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
1731 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
1732 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
1733 specified on the command line.
1734 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
1735 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
1736 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
1737 the first file untouched.
1738 * readlink: new program
1739 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
1740 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
1741 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
1742 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
1743 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
1744 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
1747 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
1748 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
1749 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
1750 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
1751 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
1752 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
1753 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
1754 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
1755 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
1756 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
1757 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
1758 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
1760 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
1761 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
1762 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
1764 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
1765 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
1766 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
1767 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
1768 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
1769 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
1770 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
1771 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
1774 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
1775 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
1778 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
1779 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
1780 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
1781 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
1782 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
1783 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
1784 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
1787 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
1788 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
1790 ========================================================================
1791 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
1792 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
1795 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
1797 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
1798 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
1799 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
1800 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
1801 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
1802 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
1803 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
1804 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
1805 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
1806 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
1807 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
1808 The old options will continue to work for a while.
1810 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
1811 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
1812 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
1813 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
1815 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
1818 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
1820 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
1821 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
1822 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
1823 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
1824 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
1825 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
1826 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
1829 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
1830 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
1831 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
1832 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
1833 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
1834 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
1835 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
1836 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
1837 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
1838 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
1839 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
1840 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
1841 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
1842 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
1843 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
1844 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
1846 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
1847 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
1849 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
1850 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
1851 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
1852 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
1853 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
1854 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
1856 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
1857 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
1858 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
1859 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
1860 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
1861 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
1862 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
1864 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
1865 the source files in the following example:
1866 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
1867 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
1868 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
1869 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
1870 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
1871 links between source files with --preserve=links
1872 * cp accepts new options:
1873 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
1874 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
1875 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
1876 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
1877 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
1878 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
1879 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
1880 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
1881 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
1883 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
1884 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
1885 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
1886 even though it's older than dest.
1887 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
1888 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
1889 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
1890 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
1891 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
1893 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
1894 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
1895 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
1896 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
1897 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
1898 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
1899 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
1901 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
1902 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
1903 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
1905 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
1906 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
1907 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
1908 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
1909 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
1910 This is the default.
1912 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
1913 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
1914 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
1915 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
1916 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
1918 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
1921 ========================================================================
1922 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
1923 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
1926 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
1927 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
1929 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
1930 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
1931 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
1932 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
1933 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
1935 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
1936 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
1937 that specifies a non-directory
1940 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
1941 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
1942 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
1943 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
1944 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
1945 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
1946 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
1947 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
1948 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
1949 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
1950 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
1951 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
1952 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
1953 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
1954 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
1955 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
1956 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
1957 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
1958 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
1959 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
1960 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
1961 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
1962 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
1963 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
1965 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
1966 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
1967 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
1969 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
1971 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
1972 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
1974 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
1975 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
1976 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
1977 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
1978 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
1980 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
1981 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
1982 required support; from Bruno Haible.
1983 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
1984 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
1986 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
1988 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
1989 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
1990 * still more portability fixes
1991 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
1992 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
1994 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
1996 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
1998 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
2000 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
2001 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
2002 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
2003 there is any time remaining
2004 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
2006 ========================================================================
2007 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2008 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
2010 This package began as the union of the following:
2011 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
2013 ========================================================================
2015 Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 Free Software
2018 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
2019 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
2020 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
2021 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
2022 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
2023 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.