1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
9 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
10 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
11 sha384sum and sha512sum.
15 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
16 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
17 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
18 eventually exits nonzero.
20 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
21 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
22 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
23 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
24 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
26 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
27 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
28 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
30 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
31 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
32 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
34 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
35 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
36 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
38 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
39 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
40 Before, this would infloop:
41 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
42 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
44 ** Changes in behavior
46 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
50 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
51 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
52 format-changing options.
54 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
55 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
56 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
57 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
58 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
62 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
63 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
64 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
65 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
66 are run without following the instructions in README.
68 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
69 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
70 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
71 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
72 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
73 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
74 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
77 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
81 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
82 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
83 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
84 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
86 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
87 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
88 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
89 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
91 sort -u could read freed memory.
92 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
93 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
94 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
98 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
99 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
100 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
101 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
104 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
108 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
109 processes will not intersperse their output.
110 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
112 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
113 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
114 date: invalid date '\260'
115 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
117 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
118 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
119 lines output by df, can work reliably.
120 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
122 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
123 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
124 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
126 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
127 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
128 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
129 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
130 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
131 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
133 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
134 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
136 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
137 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
139 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
140 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
141 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
143 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
144 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
145 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
149 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
151 ** Changes in behavior
153 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
154 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
155 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
156 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
157 have any reason to include it here.
161 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
162 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
163 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
165 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
166 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
167 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
170 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
174 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
175 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
176 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
177 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
178 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
179 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
181 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
182 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
183 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
184 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
185 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
186 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
187 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
189 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
190 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
192 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
193 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
197 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
198 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
200 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
202 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
204 ** Changes in behavior
206 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
207 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
208 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
210 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
211 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
214 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
218 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
219 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
220 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
221 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
222 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
223 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
224 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
225 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
227 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
228 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
229 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
230 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
231 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
233 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
234 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
236 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
237 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
239 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
240 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
242 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
243 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
245 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
246 additional static suffix to output file names.
248 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
249 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
250 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
252 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
253 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
257 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
258 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
259 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
261 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
262 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
263 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
264 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
265 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
266 typically still point to one of the hard links.
268 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
269 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
270 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
271 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
272 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
274 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
275 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
276 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
277 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
281 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
282 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
283 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
285 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
286 instead of causing a usage failure.
288 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
291 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
295 realpath: print resolved file names.
299 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
300 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
302 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
303 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
305 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
306 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
307 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
308 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
309 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
310 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
312 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
313 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
314 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
316 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
317 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
318 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
320 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
321 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
322 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
323 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
324 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
326 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
328 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
329 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
331 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
332 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
333 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
335 ** Changes in behavior
337 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
338 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
339 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
340 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
341 usually-short referent instead.
343 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
344 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
345 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
346 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
349 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
353 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
354 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
355 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
357 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
358 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
360 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
361 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
365 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
366 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
368 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
369 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
370 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
371 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
373 ** Changes in behavior
375 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
376 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
377 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
381 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
382 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
383 only .tar.xz files is enough.
386 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
390 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
391 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
392 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
394 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
395 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
397 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
398 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
399 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
400 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
401 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
403 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
404 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
405 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
406 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
407 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
408 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
409 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
410 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
412 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
413 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
415 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
416 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
418 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
419 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
421 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
422 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
423 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
425 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
426 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
427 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
428 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
430 ** Changes in behavior
432 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
433 when -v or -c specified.
435 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
436 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
440 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
441 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
442 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
443 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
444 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
446 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
447 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
448 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
450 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
451 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
452 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
453 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
454 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
455 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
456 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
458 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
459 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
460 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
464 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
465 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
467 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
470 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
471 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
473 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
474 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
476 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
477 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
479 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
481 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
485 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
486 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
488 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
491 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
495 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
496 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
498 ** Changes in behavior
500 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
501 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
502 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
503 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
504 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
505 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
507 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
508 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
509 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
513 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
516 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
520 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
521 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
522 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
524 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
525 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
526 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
528 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
529 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
530 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
532 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
533 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
535 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
536 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
538 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
539 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
541 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
542 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
546 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
547 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
548 processed portion thereof.
550 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
551 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
553 ** Changes in behavior
555 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
556 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
557 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
559 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
560 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
561 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
563 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
564 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
566 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
567 Use --preserve-context instead.
569 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
572 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
576 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
577 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
578 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
579 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
580 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
582 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
583 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
585 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
586 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
587 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
589 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
590 reject file names invalid for that file system.
592 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
593 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
597 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
598 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
599 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
600 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
601 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
602 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
603 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
604 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
606 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
607 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
608 the same number of fields are output for each line.
610 ** Changes in behavior
612 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
613 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
614 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
617 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
621 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
622 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
623 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
626 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
630 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
631 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
633 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
634 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
636 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
637 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
639 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
640 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
641 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
642 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
644 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
645 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
647 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
648 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
649 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
651 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
653 ** Changes in behavior
655 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
656 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
657 to the number of available processors.
661 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
664 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
668 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
669 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
670 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
671 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
673 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
674 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
675 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
677 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
678 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
680 ** Changes in behavior
682 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
683 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
685 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
686 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
687 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
688 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
689 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
690 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
692 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
693 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
694 the same way as the others.
697 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
701 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
702 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
703 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
705 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
706 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
708 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
709 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
710 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
712 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
713 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
715 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
716 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
718 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
719 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
720 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
722 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
723 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
724 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
725 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
729 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
730 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
732 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
735 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
736 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
738 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
740 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
741 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
742 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
744 ** Changes in behavior
746 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
747 rather than its aliased target.
749 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
750 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
751 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
753 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
754 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
755 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
756 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
757 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
758 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
759 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
760 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
762 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
764 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
766 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
767 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
770 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
771 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
772 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
773 control like taskset for example.
775 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
777 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
778 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
779 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
780 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
781 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
782 includes %C when context information is available.
784 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
785 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
786 rather than a file system attribute.
788 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
789 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
790 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
791 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
793 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
794 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
795 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
797 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
798 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
799 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
802 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
806 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
807 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
809 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
811 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
812 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
814 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
815 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
816 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
817 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
819 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
820 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
821 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
825 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
826 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
828 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
829 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
830 duration after the initial signal was sent.
832 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
833 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
834 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
835 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
836 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
837 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
838 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
839 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
840 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
842 ** Changes in behavior
844 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
845 sequence when it would be a no-op.
847 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
848 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
851 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
855 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
856 of available processors, which may not have been the case
857 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
858 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
862 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
863 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
865 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
866 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
867 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
868 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
870 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
871 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
872 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
875 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
879 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
880 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
881 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
883 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
884 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
885 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
887 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
888 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
890 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
891 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
892 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
893 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
895 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
896 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
897 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
899 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
900 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
901 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
902 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
904 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
905 renamed-aside and then recreated.
906 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
908 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
909 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
910 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
911 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
913 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
914 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
915 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
917 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
918 processes will not intersperse their output.
919 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
922 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
926 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
927 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
929 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
930 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
932 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
933 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
934 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
935 the presence of the empty string argument.
936 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
938 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
939 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
940 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
941 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
943 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
944 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
946 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
947 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
948 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
950 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
951 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
952 and with a malicious user on the same system
953 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
954 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
957 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
961 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
962 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
963 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
965 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
966 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
967 offending directory and all "contents."
969 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
970 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
971 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
973 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
974 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
975 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
977 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
978 processes will not intersperse their output.
979 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
980 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
982 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
983 output the name of the file to stdout.
984 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
986 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
987 call fails with errno == EACCES.
988 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
990 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
991 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
994 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
995 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
996 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
998 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
999 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1000 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1001 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1002 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1003 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1005 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1006 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1007 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1008 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1010 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1011 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1013 ** Changes in behavior
1015 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1016 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1017 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1018 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1019 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1021 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1022 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1023 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1024 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1026 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1028 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1029 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1030 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1031 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1032 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1036 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1040 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1041 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1043 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1044 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1046 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1047 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1048 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1050 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1051 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1054 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1058 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1059 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1060 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1062 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1063 to accommodate leap seconds.
1064 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1066 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1067 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1068 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1070 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1072 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1073 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1074 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1076 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1077 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1078 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1079 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1080 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1084 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1085 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1086 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1087 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1089 ** Changes in behavior
1091 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1092 environment variable is set.
1094 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1095 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1096 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1100 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1101 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1102 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1103 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1105 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1106 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1107 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1108 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1112 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1113 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1114 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1116 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1117 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1118 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1119 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1120 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1121 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1122 another improvement:
1124 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1125 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1128 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1132 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1133 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1134 and libraries tested at configure time.
1135 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1137 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1138 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1140 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1141 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1143 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1144 printing a summary to stderr.
1145 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1147 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1148 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1149 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1151 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1152 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1154 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1155 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1156 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1157 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1159 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1160 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1161 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1162 which is relatively unusual.
1163 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1165 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1166 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1167 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1168 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1169 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1170 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1171 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1175 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1176 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1177 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1178 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1179 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1183 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1184 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1186 ** Changes in behavior
1188 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1189 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1190 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1191 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1192 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1195 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1199 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1200 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1202 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1203 before data copying has started.
1205 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1206 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1208 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1209 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1210 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1211 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1213 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1214 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1215 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1216 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1218 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1223 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1224 for its standard streams.
1226 ** Changes in behavior
1228 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1229 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1230 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1231 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1232 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1233 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1235 ** Deprecated options
1237 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1238 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1242 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1244 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1245 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1246 a btrfs file system.
1248 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1250 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1251 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1253 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1254 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1257 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1261 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1262 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1263 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1264 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1266 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1267 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1268 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1269 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1270 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1275 make check: two tests have been corrected
1279 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1280 inherited from gnulib.
1283 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1287 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1288 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1289 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1290 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1292 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1293 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1295 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1297 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1298 systems without xattr support.
1300 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1301 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1302 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1304 ** Changes in behavior
1306 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1307 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1308 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1309 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1311 ** Improved robustness
1313 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1314 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1315 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1316 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1317 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1318 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1319 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1320 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1321 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1325 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1326 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1328 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1329 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1330 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1331 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1332 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1335 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1339 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1340 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1341 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1345 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1346 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1347 data was read, or on process exit.
1348 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1350 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1351 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1352 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1353 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1355 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1356 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1357 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1358 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1360 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1361 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1363 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1364 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1366 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1367 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1368 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1370 ** Changes in behavior
1372 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1373 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1374 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1376 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1377 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1379 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1380 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1381 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1384 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1388 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1390 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1391 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1392 install: Never copies xattrs
1394 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1395 from overwriting any existing destination file
1397 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1398 mode where this feature is available.
1400 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1401 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1402 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1403 do not modify the destination at all.
1405 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1407 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1411 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1412 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1414 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1416 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1417 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1419 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1420 processing the first file name
1422 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1423 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1424 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1425 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1427 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1428 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1430 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1431 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1434 ** Changes in behavior
1436 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1437 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1439 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1440 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1441 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1443 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1444 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1446 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1448 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1449 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1450 is still marked with a '+'.
1453 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1457 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1458 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1462 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1463 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1464 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1465 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1466 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1467 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1469 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1470 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1472 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1473 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1475 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1477 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1478 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1479 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1481 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1482 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1484 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1485 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1486 used to factor large numbers.
1488 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1491 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1493 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1495 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1496 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1498 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1499 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1500 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1501 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1503 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1504 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1505 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1507 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1508 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1512 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1514 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1515 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1517 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1518 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1520 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1522 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1523 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1527 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1528 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1529 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1531 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1533 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1534 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1535 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1537 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1538 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1539 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1541 ** Changes in behavior
1543 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1544 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1547 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1551 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1552 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1553 'futimens' system calls.
1557 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1559 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1560 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1561 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1563 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1564 with no USERNAME argument.
1566 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1567 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1568 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1570 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1571 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1572 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1573 number of fields for some inputs.
1575 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1576 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1578 ** Changes in behavior
1580 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1581 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1584 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1588 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1590 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1591 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1592 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1593 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1595 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1596 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1598 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1599 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1601 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1602 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1604 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1605 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1606 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1607 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1609 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1610 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1611 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1612 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1613 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1614 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1616 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1617 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1619 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1620 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1621 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1623 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1624 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1626 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1627 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1629 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1630 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1631 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1632 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1634 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1635 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1637 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1638 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1640 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1641 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1642 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1646 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1647 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1649 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1650 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1651 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1652 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1656 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1657 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1659 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1661 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1665 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1666 which have negative errno values.
1670 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1674 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1678 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1679 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1682 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1686 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1687 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1688 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1690 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1691 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1692 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1693 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1697 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1698 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1699 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1700 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1703 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1707 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1709 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1710 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1711 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1714 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1718 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1719 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1721 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1723 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1725 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1727 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1731 ** Changes in behavior
1733 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1734 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1736 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1737 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1739 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1740 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1741 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1745 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1746 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1747 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1748 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1749 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1750 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1751 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1752 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1753 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1754 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1755 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1757 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1758 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1759 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1762 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1765 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1766 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1767 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1769 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1770 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1771 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1774 ** New build options
1776 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1777 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1778 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1779 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1781 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1782 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1783 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1784 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1785 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1786 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1787 of "make check" fail.
1789 ** Remove deprecated options
1791 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1792 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1793 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1794 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1795 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1797 ** Improved robustness
1799 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1800 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1801 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1802 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1803 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1804 loss of the contents of a/f.
1806 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1807 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1811 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1812 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1813 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1815 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1816 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1817 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1818 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1820 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1821 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1822 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1823 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1824 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1825 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1826 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1827 destination is a symlink.
1829 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1831 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1832 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1834 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1835 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1837 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1839 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1840 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1842 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1843 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1845 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1848 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1849 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1851 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1852 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1854 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1855 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1856 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1857 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1859 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1860 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1861 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1863 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1864 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1865 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1867 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1868 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1869 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1870 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1872 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1873 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1874 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1876 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1877 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1879 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1880 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1882 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1884 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1885 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1886 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1888 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1889 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1891 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1892 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1894 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1895 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1897 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1898 [present in the original version]
1901 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1905 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1907 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1908 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1909 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1911 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1912 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1914 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1918 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1919 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1921 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1922 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1924 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1925 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1927 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1928 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1929 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1930 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1931 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1932 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1934 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1935 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1938 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1939 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1941 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1944 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1945 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1946 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1948 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1949 directory is unreadable.
1951 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1952 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1953 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1955 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1956 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1957 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1958 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1959 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1962 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1963 Before it would print nothing.
1965 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1967 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1968 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1969 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1970 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1971 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1972 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1973 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1974 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1976 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1980 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1981 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1982 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1984 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1985 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1986 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1987 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1990 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1994 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1995 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1996 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1997 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1998 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1999 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2000 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2002 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2003 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2004 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2005 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2006 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2007 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2008 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2009 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2011 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2012 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2013 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2016 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2020 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2021 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2023 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2024 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2025 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2027 ** Improved robustness
2029 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2030 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2031 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2034 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2038 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2039 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2040 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2041 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2042 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2044 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2048 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2051 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2055 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2056 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2057 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2058 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2060 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2061 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2063 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2064 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2065 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2068 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2070 ** Improved robustness
2072 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2073 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2075 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2076 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2077 or NFS-mounted partition.
2079 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2080 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2084 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2085 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2086 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2087 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2088 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2089 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2091 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2092 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2094 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2095 or neglect to report file removal.
2097 For the "groups" command:
2099 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2100 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2102 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2104 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2106 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2110 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2111 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2114 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2116 ** Changes in behavior
2118 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2119 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2120 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2121 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2123 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2124 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2125 a final './' or '../' component.
2127 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2128 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2129 this only for pipes.
2131 ** Infrastructure changes
2133 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2134 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2135 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2136 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2140 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2141 name is "." or "..".
2143 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2144 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2145 dirent.d_type support.
2147 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2148 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2150 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2151 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2152 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2153 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2156 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2158 ** Changes in behavior
2160 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2164 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2165 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2169 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2170 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2171 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2173 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2174 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2176 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2177 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2179 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2181 ** Improved robustness
2183 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2184 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2185 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2187 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2188 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2191 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2192 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2194 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2195 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2197 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2198 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2200 ** Changes in behavior
2202 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2203 where the two are distinct.
2205 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2206 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2207 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2208 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2209 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2210 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2211 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2212 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2213 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2214 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2215 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2216 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2217 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2218 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2219 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2220 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2221 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2223 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2224 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2225 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2227 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2228 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2229 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2230 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2233 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2234 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2238 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2239 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2240 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2241 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2243 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2244 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2245 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2247 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2248 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2249 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2250 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2251 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2254 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2255 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2257 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2258 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2259 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2260 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2262 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2263 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2264 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2266 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2267 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2268 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2269 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2271 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2272 and sticky) with the -m option.
2274 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2275 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2276 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2277 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2278 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2280 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2281 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2283 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2287 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2288 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2289 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2290 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2292 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2294 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2296 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2297 silently ignoring one of them.
2299 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2300 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2301 containing this change was 5.92.
2303 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2304 automatically newline terminated.
2306 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2307 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2308 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2309 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2312 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2313 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2314 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2317 ** Scheduled for removal
2319 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2320 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2322 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2323 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2324 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2325 command to unlink a directory.
2327 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2328 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2329 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2330 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2334 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2335 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2336 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2337 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2338 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2339 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2343 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2344 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2346 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2348 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2349 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2350 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2352 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2353 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2356 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2357 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2359 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2360 list directories before files.
2362 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2363 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2364 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2365 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2368 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2370 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2372 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2373 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2374 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2376 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2377 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2381 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2382 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2383 usually printing nothing.
2385 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2387 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2388 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2389 them with hard-linked directories.
2391 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2392 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2393 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2395 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2396 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2397 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2399 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2402 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2403 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2405 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2406 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2408 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2409 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2411 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2412 all command-line arguments.
2414 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2416 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2418 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2419 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2421 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2423 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2424 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2425 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2426 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2427 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2429 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2430 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2432 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2433 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2434 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2435 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2437 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2439 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2443 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2444 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2446 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2447 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2449 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2450 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2452 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2453 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2455 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2456 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2458 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2460 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2461 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2462 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2465 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2467 ** Build-related bug fixes
2469 installing .mo files would fail
2472 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2476 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2478 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2481 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2485 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2486 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2490 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2492 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2493 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2495 ** Deprecated options
2497 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2498 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2500 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2504 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2506 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2507 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2508 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2509 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2511 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2514 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2520 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2525 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2527 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2529 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2530 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2531 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2533 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2534 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2535 problematic usages. These include:
2537 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2538 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2539 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2540 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2541 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2542 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2543 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2544 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2545 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2547 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2548 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2550 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2551 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2552 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2553 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2555 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2556 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2557 between binary and text files.
2559 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2563 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2567 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2568 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2570 head tac tail tee tr
2571 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2573 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2574 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2576 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2577 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2578 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2580 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2582 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2584 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2585 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2586 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2590 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2592 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2593 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2595 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2596 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2597 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2601 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2602 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2606 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2607 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2608 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2612 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2613 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2617 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2619 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2621 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2625 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2626 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2627 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2629 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2630 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2631 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2632 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2633 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2635 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2639 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2640 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2641 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2643 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2645 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2646 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2647 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2648 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2650 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2652 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2653 rather than silently wrapping around.
2655 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2656 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2658 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2659 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2661 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2662 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2663 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2664 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2666 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2668 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2670 ** Improved robustness
2672 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2673 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2674 no matter how large the result.
2676 ** Improved portability
2678 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2679 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2681 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2683 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2684 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2685 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2687 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2688 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2692 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2693 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2695 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2697 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2698 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2699 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2700 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2702 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2703 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2705 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2706 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2707 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2709 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2711 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2712 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2714 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2715 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2717 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2719 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2720 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2722 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2723 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2725 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2726 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2727 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2729 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2731 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2733 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2737 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2739 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2740 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2741 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2743 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2744 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2746 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2747 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2748 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2750 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2751 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2753 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2754 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2755 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2756 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2758 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2759 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2761 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2762 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2763 the file system does not support it.
2765 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2767 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2768 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2770 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2772 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2773 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2775 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2776 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2777 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2778 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2780 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2781 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2784 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2785 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2786 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2787 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2789 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2790 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2791 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2792 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2794 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2795 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2797 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2799 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2800 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2801 reporting incorrect results.
2805 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2806 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2808 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2811 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2813 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2814 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2816 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2817 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2819 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2822 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2823 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2824 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2825 the file name does not look like a page range.
2827 printf has several changes:
2829 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2830 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2832 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2833 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2834 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2836 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2837 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2840 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2841 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2843 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2844 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2846 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2848 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2849 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2851 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2853 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2855 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2856 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2857 when first encountering the directory.
2861 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2862 output; POSIX requires this.
2864 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2865 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2867 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2869 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2870 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2872 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2873 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2875 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2876 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2877 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2878 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2879 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2880 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2881 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2883 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2884 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2885 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2887 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2888 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2890 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2892 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2894 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2895 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2896 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2897 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2899 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2903 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2904 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2905 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2906 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
2907 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
2909 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2910 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2911 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2913 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2914 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2916 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2917 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2919 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2920 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2921 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2922 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2923 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2925 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2926 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2928 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2929 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2931 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2933 nocreat do not create the output file
2934 excl fail if the output file already exists
2935 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2936 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2938 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2940 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2941 direct use direct I/O for data
2942 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2943 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2944 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2945 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2946 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2948 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2950 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2951 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
2954 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2955 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2956 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2957 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2958 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2959 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2961 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2962 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2964 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2967 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2969 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2971 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2972 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2974 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2975 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2976 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2978 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2979 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2980 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2982 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2984 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2985 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2987 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2988 for compatibility with bash.
2990 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2992 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2993 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2994 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2995 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2997 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2998 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3000 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3001 ls supports TABSIZE.
3002 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3003 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3004 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3006 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3009 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3011 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3012 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3013 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3014 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3015 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3016 an offset, not as a file name.
3018 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3019 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3021 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3022 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3024 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3025 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3027 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3028 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3029 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3031 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3032 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3034 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3035 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3039 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3041 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3043 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3047 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3048 or more arguments between partitions.
3050 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3051 holes in the destination.
3053 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3054 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3055 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3056 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3057 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3058 terminates immediately.
3060 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3062 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3064 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3065 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3066 not the empty string.
3068 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3069 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3073 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3074 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3075 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3078 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3085 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3089 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3090 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3092 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3093 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3095 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3096 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3097 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3100 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3104 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3105 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3107 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3108 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3110 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3111 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3112 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3114 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3116 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3119 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3121 ** Configuration option
3123 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3124 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3128 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3129 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3133 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3134 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3135 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3138 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3139 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3140 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3141 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3142 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3143 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3144 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3147 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3151 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3152 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3153 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3155 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3156 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3158 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3160 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3161 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3162 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3163 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3165 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3167 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3168 not just the ones that reference directories
3170 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3171 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3173 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3174 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3175 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3177 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3178 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3179 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3180 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3181 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3182 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3184 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3189 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3190 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3192 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3194 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3196 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3198 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3199 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3201 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3202 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3204 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3206 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3210 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3212 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3214 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3215 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3216 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3217 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3218 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3220 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3221 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3223 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3224 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3226 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3227 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3229 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3230 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3231 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3235 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3236 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3237 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3238 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3239 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3240 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3241 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3242 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3243 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3244 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3245 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3246 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3247 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3248 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3250 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3252 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3253 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3255 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3257 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3259 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3260 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3262 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3264 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3265 without a trailing newline.
3267 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3268 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3270 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3273 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3277 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3279 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3281 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3282 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3283 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3284 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3286 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3288 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3289 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3290 be printed without leading spaces.
3292 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3293 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3298 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3299 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3300 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3302 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3304 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3305 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3307 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3308 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3310 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3311 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3313 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3315 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3317 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3319 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3320 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3322 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3324 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3326 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3327 byte offsets are specified.
3330 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3333 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3336 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3337 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3338 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3339 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3340 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3341 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3342 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3343 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3344 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3345 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3346 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3347 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3348 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3349 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3350 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3351 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3352 directory where M has write access.
3353 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3354 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3355 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3358 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3359 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3360 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3361 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3362 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3363 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3364 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3365 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3366 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3367 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3368 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3369 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3370 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3371 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3372 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3373 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3374 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3375 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3376 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3377 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3378 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3379 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3380 appeared one additional time.
3382 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3383 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3384 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3385 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3388 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3389 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3390 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3391 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3392 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3393 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3394 if there were more than 338.
3396 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3397 - false --help now exits nonzero
3400 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3401 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3402 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3403 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3406 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3407 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3408 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3409 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3410 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3413 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3414 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3415 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3416 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3417 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3418 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3419 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3422 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3423 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3424 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3425 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3426 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3427 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3429 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3430 under certain unusual conditions
3431 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3432 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3435 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3436 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3437 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3438 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3439 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3440 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3441 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3442 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3443 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3444 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3445 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3446 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3447 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3448 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3449 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3450 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3453 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3454 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3457 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3458 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3459 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3460 involving hard-linked directories
3461 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3462 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3463 character-special and block files
3466 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3467 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3468 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3469 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3470 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3471 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3472 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3473 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3474 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3476 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3477 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3478 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3479 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3480 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3481 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3482 specified on the command line.
3483 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3484 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3485 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3486 the first file untouched.
3487 * readlink: new program
3488 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3489 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3490 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3491 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3492 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3493 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3496 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3497 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3498 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3499 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3500 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3501 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3502 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3503 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3504 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3505 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3506 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3507 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3509 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3510 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3511 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3513 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3514 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3515 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3516 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3517 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3518 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3519 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3520 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3523 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3524 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3527 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3528 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3529 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3530 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3531 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3532 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3533 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3536 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3537 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3539 ========================================================================
3540 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3541 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3544 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3546 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3547 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3548 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3549 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3550 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3551 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3552 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3553 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3554 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3555 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3556 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3557 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3559 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3560 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3561 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3562 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3564 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3567 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3569 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3570 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3571 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3572 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3573 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3574 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3575 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3578 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3579 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3580 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3581 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3582 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3583 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3584 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3585 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3586 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3587 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3588 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3589 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3590 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3591 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3592 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3593 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3595 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3596 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3598 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3599 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3600 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3601 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3602 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3603 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3605 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3606 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3607 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3608 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3609 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3610 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3611 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3613 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3614 the source files in the following example:
3615 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3616 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3617 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3618 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3619 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3620 links between source files with --preserve=links
3621 * cp accepts new options:
3622 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3623 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3624 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3625 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3626 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3627 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3628 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3629 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3630 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3632 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3633 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3634 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3635 even though it's older than dest.
3636 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3637 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3638 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3639 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3640 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3642 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3643 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3644 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3645 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3646 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3647 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3648 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3650 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3651 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3652 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3654 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3655 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3656 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3657 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3658 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3659 This is the default.
3661 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3662 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3663 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3664 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3665 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3667 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3670 ========================================================================
3671 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3672 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3675 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3676 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3678 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3679 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3680 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3681 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3682 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3684 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3685 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3686 that specifies a non-directory
3689 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3690 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3691 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3692 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3693 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3694 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3695 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3696 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3697 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3698 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3699 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3700 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3701 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3702 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3703 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3704 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3705 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3706 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3707 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3708 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3709 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3710 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3711 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3712 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3714 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3715 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3716 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3718 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3720 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3721 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3723 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3724 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3725 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3726 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3727 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3729 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3730 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3731 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3732 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3733 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3735 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3737 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3738 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3739 * still more portability fixes
3740 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3741 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3743 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3745 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3747 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3749 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3750 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3751 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3752 there is any time remaining
3753 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3755 ========================================================================
3756 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3757 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3759 This package began as the union of the following:
3760 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3762 ========================================================================
3764 Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3766 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3767 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3768 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3769 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3770 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3771 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.