1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
8 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
10 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
11 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
15 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
16 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
17 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
18 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
19 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
20 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
21 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
25 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
26 For example `shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2` no longer exhausts memory.
29 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
33 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
34 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
36 ** Changes in behavior
38 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
39 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
40 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
41 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
42 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
43 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
45 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
46 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
47 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
51 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
54 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
58 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
59 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
60 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
62 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
63 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
64 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
66 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
67 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
68 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
70 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
71 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
73 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
74 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
76 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
77 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
79 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
80 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
84 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
85 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
86 processed portion thereof.
88 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
89 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
91 ** Changes in behavior
93 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
94 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
95 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
97 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
98 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
99 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
101 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
102 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
104 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
105 Use --preserve-context instead.
107 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
110 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
114 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
115 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
116 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
117 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
118 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
120 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
121 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
123 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
124 reject file names invalid for that file system.
126 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
127 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
131 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
132 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
133 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
134 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
135 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
136 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
137 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
138 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
140 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
141 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
142 the same number of fields are output for each line.
144 ** Changes in behavior
146 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
147 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
148 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
151 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
155 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
156 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
157 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
160 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
164 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
165 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
167 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
168 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
170 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
171 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
173 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
174 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
175 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
176 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
178 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
179 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
181 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
182 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
183 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
185 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
187 ** Changes in behavior
189 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
190 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
191 to the number of available processors.
195 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
198 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
202 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
203 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
204 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
205 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
207 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
208 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
209 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
211 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
212 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
214 ** Changes in behavior
216 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
217 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
219 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
220 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
221 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
222 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
223 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
224 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
226 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
227 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
228 the same way as the others.
231 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
235 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
236 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
237 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
239 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
240 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
242 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
243 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
244 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
246 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
247 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
249 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
250 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
252 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
253 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
254 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
256 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
257 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
258 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
259 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
263 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
264 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
266 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
269 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
270 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
272 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
274 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
275 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
276 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
278 ** Changes in behavior
280 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
281 rather than its aliased target.
283 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
284 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
285 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
287 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
288 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
289 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
290 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
291 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
292 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
293 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
294 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
296 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
298 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
300 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
301 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
304 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
305 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
306 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
307 control like taskset for example.
309 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
311 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
312 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
313 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
314 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
315 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
316 includes %C when context information is available.
318 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
319 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
320 rather than a file system attribute.
322 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
323 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
324 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
325 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
327 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
328 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
329 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
331 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
332 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
333 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
336 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
340 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
341 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
343 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
345 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
346 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
348 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
349 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
350 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
351 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
353 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
354 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
355 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
359 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
360 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
362 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
363 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
364 duration after the initial signal was sent.
366 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
367 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
368 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
369 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
370 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
371 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
372 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
373 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
374 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
376 ** Changes in behavior
378 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
379 sequence when it would be a no-op.
381 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
382 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
385 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
389 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
390 of available processors, which may not have been the case
391 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
392 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
396 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
397 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
399 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
400 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
401 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
402 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
404 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
405 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
406 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
409 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
413 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
414 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
415 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
417 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
418 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
419 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
421 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
422 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
424 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
425 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
426 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
427 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
429 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
430 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
431 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
433 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
434 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
435 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
436 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
438 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
439 renamed-aside and then recreated.
440 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
442 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
443 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
444 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
445 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
447 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
448 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
449 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
451 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
452 processes will not intersperse their output.
453 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
456 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
460 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
461 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
463 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
464 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
466 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
467 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
468 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
469 the presence of the empty string argument.
470 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
472 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
473 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
474 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
475 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
477 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
478 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
480 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
481 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
482 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
484 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
485 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
486 and with a malicious user on the same system
487 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
488 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
491 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
495 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
496 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
497 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
499 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
500 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
501 offending directory and all "contents."
503 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
504 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
505 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
507 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
508 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
509 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
511 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
512 processes will not intersperse their output.
513 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
514 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
516 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
517 output the name of the file to stdout.
518 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
520 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
521 call fails with errno == EACCES.
522 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
524 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
525 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
528 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
529 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
530 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
532 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
533 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
534 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
535 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
536 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
537 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
539 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
540 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
541 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
542 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
544 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
545 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
547 ** Changes in behavior
549 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
550 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
551 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
552 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
553 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
555 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
556 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
557 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
558 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
560 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
562 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
563 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
564 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
565 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
566 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
570 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
574 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
575 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
577 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
578 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
580 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
581 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
582 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
584 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
585 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
588 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
592 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
593 when the source file doesn't have write access.
594 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
596 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
597 to accommodate leap seconds.
598 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
600 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
601 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
602 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
604 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
606 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
607 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
608 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
610 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
611 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
612 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
613 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
614 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
618 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
619 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
620 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
621 directory or a symlink to a directory.
623 ** Changes in behavior
625 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
626 environment variable is set.
628 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
629 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
630 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
634 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
635 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
636 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
637 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
639 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
640 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
641 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
642 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
646 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
647 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
648 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
650 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
651 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
652 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
653 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
654 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
655 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
658 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
659 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
662 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
666 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
667 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
668 and libraries tested at configure time.
669 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
671 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
672 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
674 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
675 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
677 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
678 printing a summary to stderr.
679 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
681 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
682 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
683 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
685 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
686 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
688 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
689 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
690 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
691 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
693 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
694 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
695 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
696 which is relatively unusual.
697 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
699 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
700 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
701 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
702 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
703 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
704 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
705 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
709 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
710 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
711 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
712 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
713 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
717 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
718 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
720 ** Changes in behavior
722 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
723 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
724 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
725 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
726 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
729 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
733 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
734 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
736 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
737 before data copying has started.
739 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
740 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
742 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
743 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
744 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
745 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
747 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
748 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
749 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
750 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
752 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
757 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
758 for its standard streams.
760 ** Changes in behavior
762 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
763 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
764 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
765 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
766 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
767 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
769 ** Deprecated options
771 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
772 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
776 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
778 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
779 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
782 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
784 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
785 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
787 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
788 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
791 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
795 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
796 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
797 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
798 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
800 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
801 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
802 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
803 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
804 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
809 make check: two tests have been corrected
813 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
814 inherited from gnulib.
817 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
821 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
822 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
823 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
824 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
826 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
827 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
829 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
831 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
832 systems without xattr support.
834 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
835 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
836 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
838 ** Changes in behavior
840 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
841 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
842 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
843 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
845 ** Improved robustness
847 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
848 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
849 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
850 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
851 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
852 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
853 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
854 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
855 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
859 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
860 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
862 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
863 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
864 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
865 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
866 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
869 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
873 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
874 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
875 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
879 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
880 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
881 data was read, or on process exit.
882 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
884 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
885 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
886 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
887 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
889 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
890 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
891 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
892 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
894 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
895 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
897 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
898 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
900 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
901 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
902 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
904 ** Changes in behavior
906 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
907 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
908 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
910 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
911 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
913 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
914 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
915 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
918 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
922 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
924 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
925 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
926 install: Never copies xattrs
928 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
929 from overwriting any existing destination file
931 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
932 mode where this feature is available.
934 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
935 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
936 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
937 do not modify the destination at all.
939 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
941 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
945 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
946 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
948 cp uses much less memory in some situations
950 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
951 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
953 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
954 processing the first file name
956 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
957 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
958 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
959 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
961 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
962 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
964 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
965 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
968 ** Changes in behavior
970 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
971 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
973 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
974 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
975 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
977 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
978 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
980 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
982 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
983 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
984 is still marked with a '+'.
987 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
991 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
992 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
996 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
997 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
998 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
999 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1000 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1001 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1003 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1004 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1006 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1007 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1009 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1011 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1012 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1013 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1015 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1016 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1018 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1019 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1020 used to factor large numbers.
1022 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1025 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1027 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1029 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1030 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1032 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1033 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1034 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1035 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1037 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1038 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1039 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1041 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1042 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1046 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1048 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1049 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1051 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1052 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1054 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1056 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1057 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1061 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1062 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1063 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1065 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1067 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1068 no matter how many files are in a given directory
1070 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1071 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1072 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1074 ** Changes in behavior
1076 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1077 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1080 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1084 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1086 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1087 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1088 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1090 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1091 with no USERNAME argument.
1093 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1094 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1095 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1097 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1098 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1099 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1100 number of fields for some inputs.
1102 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1103 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1105 ** Changes in behavior
1107 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1108 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1111 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1115 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1117 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1118 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1119 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1120 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1122 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1123 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1125 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1126 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1128 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1129 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1131 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1132 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1133 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1134 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1136 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1137 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1138 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1139 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1140 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1141 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1143 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1144 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1146 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1147 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1148 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1150 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1151 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1153 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1154 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1156 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1157 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1158 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1159 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1161 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1162 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1164 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1165 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1167 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1168 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1169 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1173 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1174 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1176 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1177 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1178 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1179 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1183 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1184 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1186 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1188 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1192 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1193 which have negative errno values.
1197 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1201 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1205 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1206 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1209 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1213 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1214 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1215 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1217 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1218 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1219 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1220 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1224 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1225 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1226 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1227 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1230 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1234 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1236 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1237 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1238 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1241 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1245 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1246 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1248 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1250 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1252 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1254 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1258 ** Changes in behavior
1260 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1261 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1263 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1264 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1266 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1267 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1268 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1272 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1273 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1274 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1275 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1276 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1277 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1278 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1279 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1280 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1281 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1282 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1284 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1285 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1286 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1289 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1292 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1293 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1294 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1296 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1297 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1298 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1301 ** New build options
1303 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1304 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1305 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1306 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1308 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1309 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1310 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1311 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1312 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1313 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1314 of "make check" fail.
1316 ** Remove deprecated options
1318 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1319 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1320 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1321 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1322 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1324 ** Improved robustness
1326 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1327 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1328 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1329 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1330 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1331 loss of the contents of a/f.
1333 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1334 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1338 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1339 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1340 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1342 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1343 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1344 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1345 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1347 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1348 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1349 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1350 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1351 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1352 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1353 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1354 destination is a symlink.
1356 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1358 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1359 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1361 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1362 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1364 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1366 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1367 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1369 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1370 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1372 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1375 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1376 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1378 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1379 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1381 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1382 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1383 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1384 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1386 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1387 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1388 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1390 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1391 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1392 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1394 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1395 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1396 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1397 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1399 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1400 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1401 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1403 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1404 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1406 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1407 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1409 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1411 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1412 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1413 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1415 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1416 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1418 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1419 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1421 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1422 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1424 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1425 [present in the original version]
1428 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1432 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1434 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1435 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1436 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1438 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1439 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1441 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1445 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1446 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1448 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1449 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1451 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1452 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1454 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1455 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1456 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1457 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1458 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1459 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1461 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1462 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1465 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1466 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1468 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1471 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1472 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1473 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1475 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1476 directory is unreadable.
1478 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1479 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1480 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1482 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1483 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1484 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1485 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1486 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1489 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1490 Before it would print nothing.
1492 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1494 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1495 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1496 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1497 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1498 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1499 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1500 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1501 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1503 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1507 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1508 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1509 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1511 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1512 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1513 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1514 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1517 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1521 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1522 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1523 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1524 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1525 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1526 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1527 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1529 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1530 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1531 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1532 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1533 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1534 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1535 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1536 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1538 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1539 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1540 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1543 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1547 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1548 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1550 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1551 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1552 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1554 ** Improved robustness
1556 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1557 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1558 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1561 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1565 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1566 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1567 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1568 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1569 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1571 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1575 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1578 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1582 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1583 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1584 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1585 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1587 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1588 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1590 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1591 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1592 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1595 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1597 ** Improved robustness
1599 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1600 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1602 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1603 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1604 or NFS-mounted partition.
1606 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1607 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1611 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1612 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1613 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1614 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1615 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1616 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1618 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1619 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1621 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1622 or neglect to report file removal.
1624 For the "groups" command:
1626 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1627 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1629 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1631 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1633 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1637 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1638 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1641 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1643 ** Changes in behavior
1645 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1646 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1647 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1648 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1650 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1651 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1652 a final `./' or `../' component.
1654 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1655 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1656 this only for pipes.
1658 ** Infrastructure changes
1660 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1661 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1662 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1663 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1667 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1668 name is "." or "..".
1670 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1671 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1672 dirent.d_type support.
1674 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1675 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1677 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1678 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1679 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1680 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1683 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1685 ** Changes in behavior
1687 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1691 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1692 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1696 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1697 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1698 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1700 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1701 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1703 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1704 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1706 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1708 ** Improved robustness
1710 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1711 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1712 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1714 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1715 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1718 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1719 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1721 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1722 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1724 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1725 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1727 ** Changes in behavior
1729 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1730 where the two are distinct.
1732 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1733 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1734 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1735 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1736 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1737 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1738 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1739 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1740 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1741 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1742 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1743 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1744 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1745 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1746 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1747 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1748 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1750 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1751 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1752 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1754 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1755 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1756 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1757 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1760 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1761 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1765 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1766 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1767 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1768 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1770 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1771 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1772 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1774 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1775 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1776 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1777 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1778 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1781 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1782 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1784 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1785 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1786 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1787 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1789 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1790 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1791 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1793 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1794 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1795 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1796 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1798 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1799 and sticky) with the -m option.
1801 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1802 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1803 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1804 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1805 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1807 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1808 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1810 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1814 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1815 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1816 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1817 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1819 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1821 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1823 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1824 silently ignoring one of them.
1826 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1827 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1828 containing this change was 5.92.
1830 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1831 automatically newline terminated.
1833 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1834 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1835 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1836 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1839 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1840 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1841 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1844 ** Scheduled for removal
1846 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1847 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1849 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1850 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1851 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1852 command to unlink a directory.
1854 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1855 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1856 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1857 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1861 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1862 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1863 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1864 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1865 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1866 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1870 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1871 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1873 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1875 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1876 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1877 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1879 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1880 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1883 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1884 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1886 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1887 list directories before files.
1889 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1890 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1891 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1892 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1895 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1897 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1899 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1900 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1901 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1903 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1904 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1908 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1909 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1910 usually printing nothing.
1912 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1914 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1915 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1916 them with hard-linked directories.
1918 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1919 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1920 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1922 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1923 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1924 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1926 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1929 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1930 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1932 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1933 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1935 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1936 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1938 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1939 all command-line arguments.
1941 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1943 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1945 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1946 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1948 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1950 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1951 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1952 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1953 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1954 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1956 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1957 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1959 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1960 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1961 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1962 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1964 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1966 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1970 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1971 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1973 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1974 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1976 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1977 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1979 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1980 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1982 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1983 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1985 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1987 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1988 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1989 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1992 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1994 ** Build-related bug fixes
1996 installing .mo files would fail
1999 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2003 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2005 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2008 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2012 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2013 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2017 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2019 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2020 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2022 ** Deprecated options
2024 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2025 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
2027 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2031 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2033 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2034 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2035 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2036 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2038 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2041 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2047 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2052 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2054 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2056 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2057 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2058 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2060 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2061 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2062 problematic usages. These include:
2064 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2065 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2066 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2067 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2068 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2069 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2070 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2071 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2072 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2074 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2075 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2077 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2078 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2079 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2080 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2082 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2083 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2084 between binary and text files.
2086 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2090 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2094 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2095 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2097 head tac tail tee tr
2098 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2100 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2101 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2103 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2104 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2105 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2107 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2109 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2111 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2112 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2113 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2117 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2119 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2120 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2122 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2123 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2124 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2128 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2129 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2133 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2134 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2135 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2139 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2140 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2144 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2146 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2148 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2152 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2153 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2154 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2156 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2157 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2158 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2159 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2160 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2162 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2166 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2167 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2168 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2170 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2172 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2173 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2174 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2175 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2177 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2179 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2180 rather than silently wrapping around.
2182 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2183 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2185 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2186 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2188 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2189 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2190 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2191 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2193 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2195 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2197 ** Improved robustness
2199 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2200 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2201 no matter how large the result.
2203 ** Improved portability
2205 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2206 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2208 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2210 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2211 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2212 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2214 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2215 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2219 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2220 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2222 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2224 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2225 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2226 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2227 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2229 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2230 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2232 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2233 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2234 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2236 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2238 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2239 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2241 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2242 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2244 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2246 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2247 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2249 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2250 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2252 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2253 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2254 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2256 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2258 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2260 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2264 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2266 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2267 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2268 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2270 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2271 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2273 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2274 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2275 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2277 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2278 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2280 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2281 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2282 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2283 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2285 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2286 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2288 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2289 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2290 the file system does not support it.
2292 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2294 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2295 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2297 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2299 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2300 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2302 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2303 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2304 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2305 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2307 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2308 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2311 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2312 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2313 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2314 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2316 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2317 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2318 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2319 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2321 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2322 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2324 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2326 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2327 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2328 reporting incorrect results.
2332 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2333 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2335 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2338 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2340 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2341 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2343 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2344 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2346 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2349 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2350 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2351 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2352 the file name does not look like a page range.
2354 printf has several changes:
2356 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2357 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2359 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2360 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2361 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2363 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2364 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2367 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2368 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2370 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2371 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2373 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2375 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2376 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2378 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2380 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2382 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2383 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2384 when first encountering the directory.
2388 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2389 output; POSIX requires this.
2391 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2392 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2394 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2396 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2397 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2399 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2400 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2402 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2403 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2404 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2405 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2406 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2407 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2408 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2410 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2411 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2412 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2414 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2415 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2417 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2419 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2421 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2422 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2423 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2424 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2426 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2430 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2431 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2432 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2433 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2434 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2436 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2437 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2438 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2440 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2441 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2443 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2444 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2446 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2447 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2448 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2449 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2450 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2452 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2453 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2455 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2456 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2458 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2460 nocreat do not create the output file
2461 excl fail if the output file already exists
2462 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2463 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2465 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2467 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2468 direct use direct I/O for data
2469 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2470 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2471 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2472 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2473 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2475 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2477 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2478 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2481 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2482 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2483 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2484 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2485 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2486 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2488 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2489 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2491 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2494 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2496 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2498 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2499 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2501 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2502 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2503 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2505 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2506 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2507 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2509 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2511 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2512 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2514 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2515 for compatibility with bash.
2517 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2519 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2520 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2521 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2522 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2524 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2525 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2527 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2528 ls supports TABSIZE.
2529 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2530 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2531 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2533 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2536 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2538 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2539 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2540 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2541 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2542 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2543 an offset, not as a file name.
2545 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2546 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2548 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2549 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2551 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2552 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2554 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2555 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2556 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2558 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2559 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2561 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2562 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2566 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2568 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2570 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2574 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2575 or more arguments between partitions.
2577 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2578 holes in the destination.
2580 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2581 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2582 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2583 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2584 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2585 terminates immediately.
2587 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2589 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2591 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2592 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2593 not the empty string.
2595 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2596 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2600 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2601 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2602 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2605 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2612 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2616 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2617 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2619 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2620 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2622 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2623 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2624 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2627 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2631 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2632 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2634 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2635 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2637 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2638 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2639 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2641 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2643 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2646 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2648 ** Configuration option
2650 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2651 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2655 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2656 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2660 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2661 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2662 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2665 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2666 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2667 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2668 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2669 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2670 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2671 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2674 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2678 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2679 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2680 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2682 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2683 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2685 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2687 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2688 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2689 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2690 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2692 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2694 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2695 not just the ones that reference directories
2697 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2698 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2700 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2701 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2702 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2704 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2705 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2706 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2707 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2708 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2709 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2711 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2716 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2717 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2719 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2721 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2723 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2725 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2726 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2728 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2729 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2731 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2733 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2737 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2739 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2741 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2742 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2743 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2744 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2745 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2747 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2748 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2750 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2751 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2753 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2754 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2756 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2757 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2758 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2762 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2763 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2764 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2765 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2766 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2767 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2768 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2769 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2770 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2771 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2772 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2773 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2774 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2775 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2777 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2779 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2780 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2782 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2784 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2786 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2787 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2789 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2791 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2792 without a trailing newline.
2794 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2795 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2797 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2800 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2804 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2806 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2808 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2809 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2810 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2811 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2813 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2815 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2816 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2817 be printed without leading spaces.
2819 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2820 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2825 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2826 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2827 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2829 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2831 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2832 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2834 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2835 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2837 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2838 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2840 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2842 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2844 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2846 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2847 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2849 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2851 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2853 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2854 byte offsets are specified.
2857 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2860 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2863 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2864 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2865 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2866 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2867 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2868 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2869 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2870 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2871 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2872 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2873 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2874 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2875 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2876 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2877 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2878 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2879 directory where M has write access.
2880 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2881 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2882 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2885 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2886 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2887 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2888 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2889 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2890 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2891 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2892 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2893 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2894 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2895 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2896 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2897 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2898 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2899 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2900 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2901 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2902 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2903 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2904 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2905 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2906 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2907 appeared one additional time.
2909 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2910 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2911 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2912 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2915 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2916 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2917 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2918 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2919 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2920 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2921 if there were more than 338.
2923 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2924 - false --help now exits nonzero
2927 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2928 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2929 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2930 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2933 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2934 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2935 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2936 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2937 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2940 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2941 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2942 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2943 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2944 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2945 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2946 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2949 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2950 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2951 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2952 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2953 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2954 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2956 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2957 under certain unusual conditions
2958 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2959 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2962 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2963 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2964 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2965 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2966 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2967 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2968 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2969 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2970 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2971 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2972 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2973 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2974 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2975 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2976 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2977 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2980 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2981 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2984 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2985 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2986 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2987 involving hard-linked directories
2988 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2989 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2990 character-special and block files
2993 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2994 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2995 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2996 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2997 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2998 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2999 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3000 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3001 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3003 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
3004 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
3005 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3006 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3007 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3008 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3009 specified on the command line.
3010 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3011 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
3012 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3013 the first file untouched.
3014 * readlink: new program
3015 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3016 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3017 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3018 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3019 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3020 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3023 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3024 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3025 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3026 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3027 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3028 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3029 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3030 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3031 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3032 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3033 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3034 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3036 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3037 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3038 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3040 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3041 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3042 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3043 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3044 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3045 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3046 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3047 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3050 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3051 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3054 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3055 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3056 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3057 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3058 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3059 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3060 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3063 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3064 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3066 ========================================================================
3067 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3068 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3071 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3073 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3074 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3075 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3076 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3077 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3078 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3079 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3080 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3081 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3082 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3083 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3084 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3086 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3087 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3088 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3089 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3091 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3094 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3096 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3097 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3098 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3099 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3100 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3101 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3102 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3105 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3106 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3107 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3108 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3109 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3110 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3111 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3112 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3113 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3114 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3115 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3116 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3117 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3118 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3119 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3120 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3122 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3123 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3125 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3126 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3127 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3128 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3129 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3130 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3132 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3133 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3134 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3135 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3136 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3137 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3138 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3140 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3141 the source files in the following example:
3142 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3143 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3144 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3145 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3146 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3147 links between source files with --preserve=links
3148 * cp accepts new options:
3149 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3150 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3151 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3152 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3153 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3154 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3155 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3156 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3157 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3159 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3160 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3161 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3162 even though it's older than dest.
3163 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3164 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3165 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3166 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3167 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3169 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3170 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3171 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3172 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3173 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3174 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3175 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3177 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3178 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3179 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3181 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3182 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3183 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3184 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3185 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3186 This is the default.
3188 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3189 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3190 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3191 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3192 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3194 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3197 ========================================================================
3198 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3199 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3202 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3203 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3205 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3206 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3207 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3208 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3209 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3211 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3212 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3213 that specifies a non-directory
3216 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3217 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3218 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3219 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3220 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3221 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3222 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3223 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3224 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3225 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3226 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3227 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3228 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3229 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3230 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3231 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3232 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3233 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3234 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3235 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3236 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3237 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3238 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3239 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3241 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3242 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3243 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3245 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3247 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3248 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3250 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3251 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3252 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3253 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3254 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3256 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3257 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3258 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3259 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3260 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3262 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3264 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3265 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3266 * still more portability fixes
3267 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3268 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3270 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3272 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3274 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3276 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3277 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3278 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3279 there is any time remaining
3280 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3282 ========================================================================
3283 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3284 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3286 This package began as the union of the following:
3287 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3289 ========================================================================
3291 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3293 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3294 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3295 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3296 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3297 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3298 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.