1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.?? (2008-??-??) [stable]
7 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
9 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
10 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
11 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
12 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
14 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
15 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
17 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
18 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
20 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
21 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
23 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
24 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
25 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
26 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
28 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
29 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
31 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
32 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
33 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
35 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
36 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
38 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
39 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
40 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
41 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
43 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
44 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
46 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
47 in more cases when a directory is empty.
49 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
50 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
51 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
55 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
56 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
58 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
59 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
60 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
61 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
65 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
66 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
68 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
70 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
74 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
75 which have negative errno values.
79 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
83 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
87 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
88 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
91 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
95 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
96 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
97 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
99 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
100 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
101 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
102 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
106 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
107 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
108 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
109 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
112 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
116 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
118 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
119 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
120 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
123 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
127 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
128 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
130 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
132 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
134 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
136 ** Programs no longer installed by default
140 ** Changes in behavior
142 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
143 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
145 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
146 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
148 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
149 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
150 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
154 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
155 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
156 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
157 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
158 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
159 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
160 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
161 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
162 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
163 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
164 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
166 The following commands and options now support the standard size
167 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
168 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
171 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
174 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
175 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
176 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
178 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
179 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
180 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
185 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
186 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
187 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
188 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
190 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
191 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
192 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
193 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
194 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
195 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
196 of "make check" fail.
198 ** Remove deprecated options
200 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
201 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
202 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
203 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
204 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
206 ** Improved robustness
208 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
209 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
210 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
211 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
212 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
213 loss of the contents of a/f.
215 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
216 in its 35-colon command-line argument
220 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
221 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
222 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
224 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
225 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
226 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
227 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
229 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
230 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
231 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
232 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
233 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
234 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
235 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
236 destination is a symlink.
238 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
240 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
241 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
243 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
244 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
246 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
248 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
249 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
251 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
252 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
254 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
257 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
258 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
260 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
261 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
263 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
264 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
265 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
266 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
268 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
269 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
270 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
272 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
273 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
274 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
276 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
277 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
278 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
279 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
281 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
282 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
283 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
285 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
286 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
288 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
289 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
291 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
293 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
294 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
295 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
297 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
298 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
300 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
301 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
303 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
304 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
306 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
307 [present in the original version]
310 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
314 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
316 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
317 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
318 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
320 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
321 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
323 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
327 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
328 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
330 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
331 support but with insufficient /proc support.
333 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
334 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
336 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
337 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
338 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
339 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
340 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
341 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
343 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
344 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
347 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
348 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
350 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
353 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
354 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
355 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
357 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
358 directory is unreadable.
360 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
361 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
362 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
364 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
365 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
366 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
367 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
368 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
371 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
372 Before it would print nothing.
374 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
376 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
377 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
378 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
379 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
380 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
381 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
382 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
383 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
385 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
389 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
390 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
391 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
393 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
394 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
395 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
396 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
399 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
403 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
404 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
405 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
406 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
407 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
408 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
409 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
411 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
412 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
413 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
414 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
415 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
416 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
417 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
418 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
420 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
421 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
422 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
425 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
429 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
430 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
432 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
433 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
434 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
436 ** Improved robustness
438 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
439 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
440 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
443 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
447 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
448 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
449 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
450 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
451 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
453 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
457 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
460 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
464 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
465 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
466 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
467 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
469 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
470 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
472 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
473 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
474 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
477 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
479 ** Improved robustness
481 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
482 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
484 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
485 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
486 or NFS-mounted partition.
488 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
489 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
493 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
494 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
495 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
496 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
497 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
498 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
500 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
501 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
503 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
504 or neglect to report file removal.
506 For the "groups" command:
508 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
509 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
511 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
513 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
515 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
519 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
520 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
523 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
525 ** Changes in behavior
527 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
528 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
529 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
530 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
532 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
533 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
534 a final `./' or `../' component.
536 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
537 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
540 ** Infrastructure changes
542 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
543 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
544 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
545 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
549 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
552 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
553 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
554 dirent.d_type support.
556 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
557 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
559 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
560 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
561 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
562 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
565 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
567 ** Changes in behavior
569 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
573 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
574 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
578 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
579 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
580 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
582 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
583 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
585 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
586 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
588 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
590 ** Improved robustness
592 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
593 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
594 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
596 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
597 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
600 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
601 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
603 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
604 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
606 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
607 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
609 ** Changes in behavior
611 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
612 where the two are distinct.
614 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
615 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
616 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
617 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
618 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
619 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
620 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
621 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
622 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
623 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
624 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
625 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
626 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
627 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
628 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
629 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
630 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
632 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
633 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
634 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
636 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
637 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
638 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
639 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
642 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
643 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
647 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
648 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
649 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
650 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
652 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
653 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
654 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
656 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
657 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
658 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
659 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
660 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
663 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
664 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
666 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
667 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
668 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
669 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
671 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
672 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
673 successful and the output is easier to parse.
675 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
676 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
677 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
678 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
680 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
681 and sticky) with the -m option.
683 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
684 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
685 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
686 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
687 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
689 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
690 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
692 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
696 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
697 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
698 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
699 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
701 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
703 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
705 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
706 silently ignoring one of them.
708 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
709 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
710 containing this change was 5.92.
712 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
713 automatically newline terminated.
715 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
716 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
717 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
718 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
721 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
722 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
723 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
726 ** Scheduled for removal
728 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
729 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
731 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
732 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
733 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
734 command to unlink a directory.
736 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
737 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
738 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
739 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
743 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
744 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
745 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
746 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
747 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
748 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
752 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
753 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
755 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
757 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
758 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
759 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
761 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
762 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
765 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
766 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
768 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
769 list directories before files.
771 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
772 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
773 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
774 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
777 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
779 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
781 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
782 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
783 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
785 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
786 list of NUL-terminated file names.
790 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
791 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
792 usually printing nothing.
794 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
796 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
797 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
798 them with hard-linked directories.
800 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
801 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
802 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
804 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
805 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
806 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
808 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
811 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
812 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
814 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
815 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
817 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
818 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
820 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
821 all command-line arguments.
823 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
825 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
827 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
828 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
830 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
832 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
833 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
834 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
835 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
836 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
838 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
839 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
841 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
842 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
843 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
844 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
846 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
848 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
852 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
853 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
855 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
856 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
858 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
859 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
861 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
862 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
864 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
865 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
867 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
869 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
870 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
871 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
874 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
876 ** Build-related bug fixes
878 installing .mo files would fail
881 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
885 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
887 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
890 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
894 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
895 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
899 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
901 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
902 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
904 ** Deprecated options
906 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
907 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
909 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
913 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
915 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
916 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
917 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
918 conforming to older POSIX versions.
920 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
923 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
929 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
934 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
936 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
938 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
939 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
940 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
942 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
943 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
944 problematic usages. These include:
946 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
947 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
948 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
949 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
950 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
951 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
952 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
953 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
954 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
956 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
957 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
959 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
960 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
961 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
962 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
964 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
965 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
966 between binary and text files.
968 The following programs now always use text input/output:
972 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
976 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
977 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
980 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
982 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
983 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
985 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
986 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
987 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
989 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
991 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
993 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
994 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
995 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
999 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1001 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1002 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1004 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1005 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1006 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1010 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1011 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1015 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1016 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1017 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1021 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1022 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1026 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1028 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1030 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1034 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1035 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1036 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1038 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1039 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1040 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1041 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1042 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1044 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
1048 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
1049 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
1050 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
1052 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
1054 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
1055 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
1056 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
1057 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
1059 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
1061 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
1062 rather than silently wrapping around.
1064 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
1065 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
1067 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
1068 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
1070 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
1071 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
1072 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
1073 file /tmp/a/b/file".
1075 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
1077 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
1079 ** Improved robustness
1081 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
1082 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
1083 no matter how large the result.
1085 ** Improved portability
1087 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
1088 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
1090 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
1092 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
1093 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
1094 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
1096 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
1097 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
1101 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
1102 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
1104 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
1106 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
1107 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
1108 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
1109 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
1111 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
1112 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
1114 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
1115 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
1116 categories if not specified by dircolors.
1118 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
1120 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
1121 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
1123 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
1124 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
1126 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
1128 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
1129 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
1131 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
1132 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
1134 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
1135 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
1136 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
1138 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
1140 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
1142 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
1146 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
1148 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
1149 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
1150 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
1152 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
1153 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
1155 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
1156 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
1157 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
1159 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
1160 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
1162 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
1163 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
1164 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
1165 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
1167 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
1168 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
1170 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
1171 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
1172 the file system does not support it.
1174 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
1176 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
1177 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
1179 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
1181 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
1182 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
1184 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
1185 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
1186 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
1187 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
1189 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
1190 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
1193 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
1194 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
1195 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
1196 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
1198 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
1199 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
1200 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
1201 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
1203 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
1204 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
1206 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
1208 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
1209 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
1210 reporting incorrect results.
1214 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
1215 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
1217 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
1220 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
1222 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
1223 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
1225 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
1226 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
1228 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
1231 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
1232 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
1233 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
1234 the file name does not look like a page range.
1236 printf has several changes:
1238 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
1239 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
1241 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
1242 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
1243 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
1245 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
1246 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
1249 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
1250 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
1252 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
1253 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
1255 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
1257 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
1258 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
1260 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
1262 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
1264 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
1265 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
1266 when first encountering the directory.
1270 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
1271 output; POSIX requires this.
1273 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
1274 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
1276 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
1278 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
1279 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
1281 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
1282 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
1284 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
1285 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
1286 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
1287 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
1288 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
1289 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
1290 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
1292 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
1293 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
1294 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
1296 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
1297 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
1299 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
1301 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
1303 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
1304 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
1305 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
1306 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
1308 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
1312 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
1313 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
1314 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
1315 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
1316 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
1318 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
1319 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
1320 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
1322 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
1323 is longer than PATH_MAX.
1325 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
1326 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
1328 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
1329 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
1330 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
1331 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
1332 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
1334 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
1335 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
1337 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
1338 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
1340 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
1342 nocreat do not create the output file
1343 excl fail if the output file already exists
1344 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
1345 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
1347 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
1349 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
1350 direct use direct I/O for data
1351 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
1352 sync likewise, but also for metadata
1353 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
1354 nofollow do not follow symlinks
1355 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
1357 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
1359 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
1360 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
1363 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
1364 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
1365 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
1366 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
1367 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
1368 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
1370 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1371 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1373 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
1376 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
1378 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
1380 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
1381 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
1383 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
1384 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
1385 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
1387 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
1388 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
1389 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
1391 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
1393 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
1394 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
1396 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
1397 for compatibility with bash.
1399 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
1401 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
1402 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
1403 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
1404 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
1406 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
1407 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
1409 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
1410 ls supports TABSIZE.
1411 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
1412 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
1413 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
1415 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
1418 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
1420 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
1421 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
1422 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
1423 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
1424 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
1425 an offset, not as a file name.
1427 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
1428 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
1430 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
1431 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
1433 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
1434 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
1436 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
1437 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
1438 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
1440 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
1441 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
1443 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
1444 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
1448 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
1450 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
1452 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
1456 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
1457 or more arguments between partitions.
1459 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
1460 holes in the destination.
1462 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
1463 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
1464 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
1465 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
1466 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
1467 terminates immediately.
1469 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
1471 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
1473 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
1474 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
1475 not the empty string.
1477 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
1478 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
1482 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
1483 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
1484 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
1487 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
1494 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
1498 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
1499 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
1501 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
1502 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
1504 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
1505 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
1506 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
1509 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
1513 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
1514 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
1516 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
1517 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
1519 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
1520 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
1521 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
1523 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
1525 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
1528 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
1530 ** Configuration option
1532 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
1533 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
1537 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
1538 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
1542 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
1543 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
1544 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
1547 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
1548 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
1549 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
1550 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
1551 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
1552 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
1553 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
1556 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
1560 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
1561 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
1562 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
1564 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
1565 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
1567 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
1569 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
1570 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
1571 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
1572 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
1574 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
1576 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
1577 not just the ones that reference directories
1579 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
1580 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
1582 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
1583 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
1584 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
1586 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
1587 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
1588 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
1589 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
1590 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
1591 ragged when a datum was too wide.
1593 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
1598 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
1599 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
1601 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
1603 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
1605 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
1607 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
1608 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
1610 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
1611 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
1613 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
1615 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
1619 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
1621 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
1623 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
1624 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
1625 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
1626 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
1627 resolution is the best we can do right now.
1629 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
1630 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
1632 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
1633 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
1635 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
1636 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
1638 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
1639 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
1640 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
1644 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
1645 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
1646 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
1647 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
1648 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
1649 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
1650 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
1651 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
1652 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
1653 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
1654 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
1655 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
1656 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
1657 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
1659 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
1661 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
1662 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
1664 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
1666 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
1668 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
1669 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
1671 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
1673 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
1674 without a trailing newline.
1676 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
1677 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
1679 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
1682 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
1686 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
1688 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
1690 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
1691 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
1692 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
1693 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
1695 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
1697 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
1698 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
1699 be printed without leading spaces.
1701 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
1702 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
1707 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
1708 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
1709 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
1711 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
1713 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
1714 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
1716 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
1717 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
1719 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
1720 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
1722 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
1724 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
1726 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
1728 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
1729 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
1731 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
1733 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
1735 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
1736 byte offsets are specified.
1739 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
1742 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
1745 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
1746 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
1747 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
1748 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
1749 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
1750 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
1751 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
1752 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
1753 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
1754 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
1755 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
1756 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
1757 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
1758 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
1759 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
1760 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
1761 directory where M has write access.
1762 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
1763 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
1764 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
1767 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
1768 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
1769 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
1770 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
1771 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
1772 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
1773 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
1774 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
1775 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
1776 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
1777 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
1778 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
1779 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
1780 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
1781 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
1782 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
1783 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
1784 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
1785 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
1786 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
1787 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
1788 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
1789 appeared one additional time.
1791 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
1792 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
1793 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
1794 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
1797 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
1798 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
1799 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
1800 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
1801 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
1802 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
1803 if there were more than 338.
1805 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
1806 - false --help now exits nonzero
1809 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
1810 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
1811 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
1812 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
1815 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
1816 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
1817 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
1818 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
1819 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
1822 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
1823 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
1824 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
1825 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
1826 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
1827 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
1828 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
1831 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
1832 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
1833 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
1834 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
1835 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
1836 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
1838 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
1839 under certain unusual conditions
1840 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
1841 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
1844 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
1845 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
1846 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
1847 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
1848 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
1849 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
1850 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
1851 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
1852 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
1853 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
1854 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
1855 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
1856 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
1857 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
1858 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
1859 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
1862 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
1863 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
1866 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
1867 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
1868 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
1869 involving hard-linked directories
1870 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
1871 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
1872 character-special and block files
1875 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
1876 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
1877 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
1878 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
1879 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
1880 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
1881 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
1882 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
1883 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
1885 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
1886 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
1887 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
1888 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
1889 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
1890 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
1891 specified on the command line.
1892 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
1893 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
1894 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
1895 the first file untouched.
1896 * readlink: new program
1897 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
1898 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
1899 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
1900 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
1901 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
1902 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
1905 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
1906 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
1907 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
1908 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
1909 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
1910 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
1911 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
1912 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
1913 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
1914 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
1915 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
1916 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
1918 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
1919 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
1920 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
1922 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
1923 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
1924 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
1925 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
1926 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
1927 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
1928 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
1929 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
1932 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
1933 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
1936 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
1937 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
1938 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
1939 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
1940 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
1941 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
1942 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
1945 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
1946 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
1948 ========================================================================
1949 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
1950 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
1953 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
1955 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
1956 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
1957 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
1958 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
1959 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
1960 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
1961 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
1962 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
1963 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
1964 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
1965 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
1966 The old options will continue to work for a while.
1968 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
1969 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
1970 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
1971 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
1973 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
1976 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
1978 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
1979 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
1980 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
1981 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
1982 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
1983 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
1984 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
1987 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
1988 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
1989 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
1990 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
1991 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
1992 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
1993 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
1994 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
1995 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
1996 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
1997 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
1998 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
1999 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2000 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2001 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2002 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2004 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2005 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2007 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2008 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2009 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2010 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2011 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2012 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2014 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2015 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2016 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2017 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2018 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2019 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2020 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2022 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2023 the source files in the following example:
2024 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2025 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2026 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2027 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2028 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2029 links between source files with --preserve=links
2030 * cp accepts new options:
2031 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2032 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2033 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2034 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2035 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2036 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2037 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2038 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2039 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2041 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2042 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2043 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2044 even though it's older than dest.
2045 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
2046 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
2047 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
2048 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
2049 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
2051 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
2052 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
2053 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
2054 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
2055 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
2056 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
2057 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
2059 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
2060 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
2061 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
2063 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
2064 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
2065 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
2066 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
2067 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
2068 This is the default.
2070 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
2071 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
2072 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
2073 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
2074 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
2076 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
2079 ========================================================================
2080 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
2081 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2084 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
2085 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
2087 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2088 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
2089 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
2090 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
2091 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
2093 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
2094 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
2095 that specifies a non-directory
2098 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
2099 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
2100 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
2101 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
2102 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2103 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
2104 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
2105 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2106 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
2107 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
2108 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
2109 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
2110 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
2111 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
2112 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
2113 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
2114 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
2115 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
2116 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
2117 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
2118 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
2119 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
2120 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
2121 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
2123 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
2124 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
2125 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
2127 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
2129 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
2130 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
2132 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
2133 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
2134 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
2135 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
2136 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
2138 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
2139 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
2140 required support; from Bruno Haible.
2141 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
2142 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
2144 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
2146 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
2147 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
2148 * still more portability fixes
2149 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
2150 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2152 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
2154 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
2156 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
2158 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
2159 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
2160 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
2161 there is any time remaining
2162 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
2164 ========================================================================
2165 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2166 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
2168 This package began as the union of the following:
2169 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
2171 ========================================================================
2173 Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 Free Software
2176 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
2177 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
2178 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
2179 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
2180 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
2181 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.