1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
8 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
11 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
15 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
16 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
17 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
19 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
20 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
22 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
23 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
24 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
25 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
26 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
28 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
29 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
30 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
31 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
32 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
33 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
34 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
35 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
37 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
38 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
40 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
41 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
43 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
44 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
46 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
47 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
48 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
50 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
51 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
52 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
53 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
55 ** Changes in behavior
57 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
58 when -v or -c specified.
60 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
61 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
65 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
66 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
67 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
68 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
69 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
71 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
72 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
73 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
75 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
76 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
77 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
78 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
79 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
80 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
81 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
83 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
84 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
85 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
89 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
90 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
92 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
95 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
96 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
98 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
99 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
101 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
102 For example `shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2` no longer exhausts memory.
104 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
106 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
110 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
111 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
113 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
116 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
120 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
121 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
123 ** Changes in behavior
125 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
126 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
127 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
128 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
129 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
130 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
132 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
133 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
134 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
138 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
141 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
145 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
146 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
147 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
149 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
150 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
151 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
153 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
154 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
155 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
157 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
158 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
160 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
161 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
163 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
164 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
166 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
167 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
171 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
172 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
173 processed portion thereof.
175 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
176 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
178 ** Changes in behavior
180 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
181 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
182 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
184 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
185 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
186 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
188 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
189 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
191 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
192 Use --preserve-context instead.
194 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
197 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
201 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
202 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
203 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
204 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
205 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
207 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
208 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
210 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
211 reject file names invalid for that file system.
213 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
214 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
218 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
219 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
220 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
221 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
222 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
223 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
224 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
225 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
227 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
228 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
229 the same number of fields are output for each line.
231 ** Changes in behavior
233 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
234 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
235 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
238 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
242 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
243 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
244 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
247 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
251 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
252 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
254 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
255 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
257 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
258 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
260 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
261 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
262 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
263 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
265 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
266 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
268 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
269 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
270 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
272 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
274 ** Changes in behavior
276 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
277 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
278 to the number of available processors.
282 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
285 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
289 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
290 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
291 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
292 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
294 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
295 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
296 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
298 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
299 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
301 ** Changes in behavior
303 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
304 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
306 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
307 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
308 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
309 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
310 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
311 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
313 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
314 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
315 the same way as the others.
318 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
322 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
323 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
324 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
326 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
327 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
329 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
330 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
331 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
333 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
334 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
336 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
337 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
339 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
340 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
341 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
343 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
344 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
345 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
346 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
350 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
351 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
353 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
356 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
357 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
359 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
361 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
362 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
363 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
365 ** Changes in behavior
367 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
368 rather than its aliased target.
370 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
371 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
372 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
374 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
375 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
376 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
377 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
378 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
379 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
380 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
381 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
383 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
385 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
387 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
388 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
391 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
392 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
393 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
394 control like taskset for example.
396 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
398 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
399 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
400 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
401 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
402 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
403 includes %C when context information is available.
405 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
406 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
407 rather than a file system attribute.
409 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
410 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
411 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
412 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
414 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
415 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
416 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
418 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
419 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
420 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
423 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
427 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
428 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
430 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
432 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
433 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
435 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
436 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
437 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
438 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
440 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
441 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
442 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
446 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
447 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
449 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
450 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
451 duration after the initial signal was sent.
453 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
454 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
455 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
456 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
457 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
458 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
459 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
460 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
461 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
463 ** Changes in behavior
465 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
466 sequence when it would be a no-op.
468 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
469 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
472 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
476 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
477 of available processors, which may not have been the case
478 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
479 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
483 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
484 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
486 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
487 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
488 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
489 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
491 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
492 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
493 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
496 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
500 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
501 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
502 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
504 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
505 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
506 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
508 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
509 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
511 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
512 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
513 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
514 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
516 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
517 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
518 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
520 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
521 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
522 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
523 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
525 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
526 renamed-aside and then recreated.
527 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
529 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
530 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
531 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
532 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
534 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
535 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
536 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
538 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
539 processes will not intersperse their output.
540 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
543 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
547 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
548 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
550 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
551 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
553 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
554 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
555 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
556 the presence of the empty string argument.
557 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
559 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
560 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
561 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
562 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
564 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
565 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
567 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
568 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
569 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
571 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
572 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
573 and with a malicious user on the same system
574 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
575 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
578 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
582 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
583 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
584 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
586 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
587 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
588 offending directory and all "contents."
590 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
591 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
592 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
594 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
595 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
596 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
598 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
599 processes will not intersperse their output.
600 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
601 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
603 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
604 output the name of the file to stdout.
605 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
607 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
608 call fails with errno == EACCES.
609 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
611 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
612 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
615 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
616 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
617 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
619 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
620 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
621 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
622 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
623 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
624 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
626 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
627 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
628 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
629 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
631 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
632 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
634 ** Changes in behavior
636 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
637 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
638 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
639 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
640 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
642 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
643 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
644 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
645 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
647 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
649 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
650 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
651 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
652 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
653 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
657 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
661 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
662 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
664 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
665 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
667 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
668 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
669 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
671 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
672 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
675 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
679 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
680 when the source file doesn't have write access.
681 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
683 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
684 to accommodate leap seconds.
685 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
687 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
688 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
689 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
691 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
693 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
694 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
695 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
697 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
698 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
699 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
700 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
701 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
705 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
706 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
707 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
708 directory or a symlink to a directory.
710 ** Changes in behavior
712 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
713 environment variable is set.
715 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
716 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
717 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
721 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
722 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
723 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
724 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
726 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
727 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
728 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
729 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
733 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
734 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
735 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
737 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
738 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
739 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
740 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
741 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
742 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
745 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
746 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
749 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
753 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
754 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
755 and libraries tested at configure time.
756 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
758 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
759 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
761 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
762 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
764 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
765 printing a summary to stderr.
766 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
768 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
769 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
770 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
772 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
773 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
775 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
776 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
777 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
778 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
780 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
781 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
782 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
783 which is relatively unusual.
784 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
786 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
787 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
788 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
789 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
790 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
791 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
792 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
796 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
797 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
798 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
799 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
800 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
804 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
805 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
807 ** Changes in behavior
809 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
810 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
811 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
812 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
813 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
816 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
820 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
821 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
823 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
824 before data copying has started.
826 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
827 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
829 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
830 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
831 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
832 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
834 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
835 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
836 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
837 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
839 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
844 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
845 for its standard streams.
847 ** Changes in behavior
849 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
850 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
851 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
852 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
853 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
854 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
856 ** Deprecated options
858 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
859 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
863 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
865 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
866 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
869 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
871 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
872 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
874 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
875 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
878 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
882 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
883 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
884 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
885 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
887 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
888 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
889 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
890 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
891 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
896 make check: two tests have been corrected
900 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
901 inherited from gnulib.
904 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
908 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
909 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
910 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
911 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
913 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
914 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
916 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
918 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
919 systems without xattr support.
921 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
922 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
923 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
925 ** Changes in behavior
927 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
928 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
929 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
930 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
932 ** Improved robustness
934 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
935 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
936 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
937 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
938 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
939 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
940 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
941 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
942 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
946 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
947 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
949 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
950 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
951 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
952 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
953 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
956 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
960 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
961 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
962 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
966 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
967 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
968 data was read, or on process exit.
969 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
971 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
972 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
973 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
974 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
976 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
977 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
978 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
979 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
981 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
982 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
984 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
985 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
987 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
988 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
989 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
991 ** Changes in behavior
993 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
994 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
995 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
997 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
998 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1000 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1001 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1002 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1005 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1009 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1011 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1012 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1013 install: Never copies xattrs
1015 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1016 from overwriting any existing destination file
1018 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1019 mode where this feature is available.
1021 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1022 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1023 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1024 do not modify the destination at all.
1026 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1028 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1032 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1033 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1035 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1037 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1038 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1040 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1041 processing the first file name
1043 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1044 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1045 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1046 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1048 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1049 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1051 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1052 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1055 ** Changes in behavior
1057 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1058 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1060 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1061 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1062 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1064 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1065 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1067 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1069 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1070 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1071 is still marked with a '+'.
1074 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1078 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1079 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1083 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1084 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1085 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1086 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1087 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1088 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1090 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1091 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1093 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1094 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1096 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1098 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1099 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1100 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1102 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1103 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1105 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1106 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1107 used to factor large numbers.
1109 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1112 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1114 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1116 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1117 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1119 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1120 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1121 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1122 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1124 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1125 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1126 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1128 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1129 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1133 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1135 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1136 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1138 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1139 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1141 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1143 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1144 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1148 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1149 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1150 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1152 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1154 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1155 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1156 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1158 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1159 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1160 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1162 ** Changes in behavior
1164 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1165 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1168 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1172 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1173 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1174 'futimens' system calls.
1178 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1180 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1181 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1182 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1184 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1185 with no USERNAME argument.
1187 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1188 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1189 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1191 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1192 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1193 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1194 number of fields for some inputs.
1196 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1197 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1199 ** Changes in behavior
1201 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1202 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1205 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1209 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1211 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1212 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1213 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1214 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1216 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1217 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1219 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1220 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1222 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1223 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1225 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1226 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1227 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1228 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1230 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1231 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1232 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1233 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1234 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1235 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1237 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1238 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1240 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1241 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1242 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1244 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1245 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1247 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1248 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1250 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1251 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1252 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1253 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1255 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1256 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1258 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1259 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1261 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1262 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1263 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1267 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1268 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1270 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1271 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1272 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1273 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1277 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1278 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1280 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1282 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1286 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1287 which have negative errno values.
1291 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1295 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1299 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1300 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1303 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1307 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1308 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1309 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1311 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1312 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1313 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1314 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1318 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1319 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1320 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1321 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1324 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1328 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1330 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1331 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1332 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1335 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1339 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1340 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1342 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1344 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1346 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1348 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1352 ** Changes in behavior
1354 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1355 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1357 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1358 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1360 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1361 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1362 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1366 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1367 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1368 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1369 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1370 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1371 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1372 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1373 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1374 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1375 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1376 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1378 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1379 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1380 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1383 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1386 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1387 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1388 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1390 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1391 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1392 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1395 ** New build options
1397 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1398 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1399 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1400 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1402 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1403 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1404 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1405 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1406 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1407 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1408 of "make check" fail.
1410 ** Remove deprecated options
1412 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1413 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1414 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1415 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1416 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1418 ** Improved robustness
1420 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1421 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1422 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1423 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1424 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1425 loss of the contents of a/f.
1427 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1428 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1432 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1433 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1434 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1436 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1437 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1438 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1439 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1441 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1442 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1443 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1444 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1445 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1446 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1447 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1448 destination is a symlink.
1450 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1452 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1453 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1455 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1456 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1458 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1460 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1461 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1463 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1464 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1466 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1469 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1470 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1472 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1473 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1475 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1476 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1477 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1478 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1480 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1481 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1482 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1484 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1485 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1486 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1488 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1489 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1490 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1491 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1493 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1494 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1495 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1497 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1498 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1500 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1501 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1503 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1505 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1506 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1507 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1509 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1510 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1512 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1513 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1515 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1516 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1518 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1519 [present in the original version]
1522 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1526 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1528 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1529 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1530 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1532 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1533 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1535 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1539 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1540 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1542 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1543 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1545 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1546 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1548 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1549 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1550 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1551 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1552 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1553 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1555 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1556 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1559 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1560 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1562 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1565 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1566 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1567 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1569 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1570 directory is unreadable.
1572 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1573 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1574 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1576 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1577 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1578 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1579 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1580 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1583 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1584 Before it would print nothing.
1586 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1588 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1589 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1590 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1591 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1592 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1593 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1594 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1595 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1597 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1601 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1602 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1603 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1605 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1606 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1607 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1608 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1611 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1615 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1616 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1617 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1618 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1619 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1620 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1621 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1623 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1624 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1625 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1626 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1627 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1628 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1629 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1630 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1632 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1633 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1634 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1637 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1641 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1642 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1644 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1645 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1646 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1648 ** Improved robustness
1650 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1651 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1652 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1655 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1659 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1660 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1661 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1662 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1663 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1665 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1669 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1672 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1676 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1677 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1678 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1679 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1681 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1682 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1684 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1685 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1686 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1689 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1691 ** Improved robustness
1693 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1694 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1696 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1697 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1698 or NFS-mounted partition.
1700 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1701 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1705 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1706 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1707 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1708 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1709 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1710 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1712 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1713 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1715 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1716 or neglect to report file removal.
1718 For the "groups" command:
1720 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1721 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1723 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1725 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1727 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1731 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1732 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1735 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1737 ** Changes in behavior
1739 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1740 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1741 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1742 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1744 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1745 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1746 a final `./' or `../' component.
1748 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1749 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1750 this only for pipes.
1752 ** Infrastructure changes
1754 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1755 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1756 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1757 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1761 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1762 name is "." or "..".
1764 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1765 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1766 dirent.d_type support.
1768 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1769 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1771 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1772 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1773 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1774 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1777 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1779 ** Changes in behavior
1781 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1785 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1786 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1790 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1791 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1792 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1794 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1795 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1797 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1798 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1800 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1802 ** Improved robustness
1804 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1805 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1806 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1808 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1809 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1812 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1813 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1815 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1816 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1818 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1819 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1821 ** Changes in behavior
1823 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1824 where the two are distinct.
1826 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1827 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1828 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1829 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1830 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1831 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1832 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1833 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1834 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1835 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1836 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1837 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1838 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1839 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1840 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1841 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1842 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1844 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1845 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1846 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1848 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1849 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1850 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1851 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1854 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1855 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1859 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1860 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1861 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1862 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1864 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1865 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1866 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1868 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1869 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1870 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1871 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1872 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1875 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1876 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1878 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1879 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1880 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1881 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1883 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1884 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1885 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1887 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1888 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1889 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1890 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1892 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1893 and sticky) with the -m option.
1895 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1896 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1897 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1898 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1899 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1901 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1902 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1904 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1908 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1909 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1910 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1911 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1913 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1915 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1917 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1918 silently ignoring one of them.
1920 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1921 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1922 containing this change was 5.92.
1924 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1925 automatically newline terminated.
1927 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1928 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1929 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1930 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1933 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1934 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1935 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1938 ** Scheduled for removal
1940 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1941 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1943 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1944 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1945 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1946 command to unlink a directory.
1948 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1949 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1950 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1951 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1955 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1956 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1957 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1958 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1959 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1960 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1964 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1965 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1967 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1969 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1970 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1971 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1973 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1974 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1977 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1978 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1980 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1981 list directories before files.
1983 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1984 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1985 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1986 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1989 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1991 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1993 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1994 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1995 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1997 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1998 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2002 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2003 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2004 usually printing nothing.
2006 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2008 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2009 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2010 them with hard-linked directories.
2012 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2013 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2014 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2016 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2017 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2018 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2020 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2023 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2024 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2026 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2027 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2029 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2030 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2032 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2033 all command-line arguments.
2035 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2037 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2039 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2040 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2042 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2044 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2045 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2046 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2047 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2048 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2050 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2051 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2053 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2054 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2055 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2056 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2058 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2060 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2064 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2065 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2067 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2068 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2070 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
2071 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2073 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2074 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
2076 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2077 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2079 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2081 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2082 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2083 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2086 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2088 ** Build-related bug fixes
2090 installing .mo files would fail
2093 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2097 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2099 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2102 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2106 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2107 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2111 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2113 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2114 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2116 ** Deprecated options
2118 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2119 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
2121 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2125 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2127 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2128 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2129 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2130 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2132 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2135 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2141 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2146 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2148 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2150 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2151 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2152 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2154 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2155 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2156 problematic usages. These include:
2158 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2159 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2160 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2161 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2162 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2163 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2164 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2165 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2166 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2168 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2169 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2171 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2172 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2173 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2174 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2176 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2177 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2178 between binary and text files.
2180 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2184 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2188 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2189 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2191 head tac tail tee tr
2192 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2194 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2195 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2197 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2198 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2199 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2201 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2203 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2205 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2206 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2207 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2211 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2213 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2214 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2216 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2217 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2218 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2222 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2223 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2227 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2228 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2229 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2233 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2234 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2238 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2240 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2242 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2246 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2247 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2248 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2250 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2251 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2252 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2253 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2254 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2256 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2260 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2261 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2262 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2264 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2266 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2267 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2268 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2269 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2271 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2273 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2274 rather than silently wrapping around.
2276 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2277 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2279 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2280 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2282 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2283 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2284 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2285 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2287 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2289 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2291 ** Improved robustness
2293 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2294 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2295 no matter how large the result.
2297 ** Improved portability
2299 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2300 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2302 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2304 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2305 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2306 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2308 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2309 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2313 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2314 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2316 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2318 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2319 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2320 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2321 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2323 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2324 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2326 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2327 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2328 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2330 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2332 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2333 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2335 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2336 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2338 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2340 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2341 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2343 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2344 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2346 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2347 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2348 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2350 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2352 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2354 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2358 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2360 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2361 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2362 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2364 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2365 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2367 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2368 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2369 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2371 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2372 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2374 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2375 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2376 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2377 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2379 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2380 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2382 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2383 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2384 the file system does not support it.
2386 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2388 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2389 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2391 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2393 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2394 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2396 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2397 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2398 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2399 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2401 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2402 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2405 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2406 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2407 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2408 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2410 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2411 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2412 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2413 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2415 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2416 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2418 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2420 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2421 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2422 reporting incorrect results.
2426 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2427 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2429 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2432 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2434 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2435 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2437 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2438 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2440 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2443 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2444 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2445 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2446 the file name does not look like a page range.
2448 printf has several changes:
2450 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2451 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2453 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2454 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2455 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2457 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2458 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2461 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2462 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2464 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2465 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2467 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2469 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2470 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2472 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2474 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2476 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2477 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2478 when first encountering the directory.
2482 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2483 output; POSIX requires this.
2485 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2486 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2488 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2490 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2491 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2493 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2494 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2496 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2497 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2498 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2499 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2500 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2501 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2502 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2504 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2505 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2506 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2508 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2509 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2511 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2513 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2515 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2516 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2517 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2518 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2520 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2524 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2525 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2526 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2527 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2528 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2530 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2531 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2532 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2534 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2535 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2537 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2538 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2540 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2541 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2542 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2543 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2544 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2546 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2547 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2549 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2550 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2552 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2554 nocreat do not create the output file
2555 excl fail if the output file already exists
2556 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2557 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2559 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2561 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2562 direct use direct I/O for data
2563 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2564 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2565 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2566 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2567 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2569 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2571 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2572 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2575 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2576 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2577 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2578 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2579 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2580 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2582 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2583 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2585 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2588 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2590 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2592 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2593 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2595 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2596 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2597 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2599 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2600 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2601 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2603 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2605 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2606 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2608 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2609 for compatibility with bash.
2611 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2613 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2614 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2615 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2616 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2618 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2619 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2621 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2622 ls supports TABSIZE.
2623 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2624 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2625 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2627 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2630 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2632 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2633 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2634 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2635 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2636 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2637 an offset, not as a file name.
2639 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2640 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2642 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2643 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2645 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2646 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2648 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2649 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2650 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2652 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2653 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2655 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2656 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2660 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2662 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2664 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2668 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2669 or more arguments between partitions.
2671 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2672 holes in the destination.
2674 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2675 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2676 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2677 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2678 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2679 terminates immediately.
2681 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2683 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2685 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2686 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2687 not the empty string.
2689 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2690 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2694 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2695 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2696 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2699 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2706 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2710 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2711 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2713 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2714 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2716 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2717 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2718 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2721 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2725 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2726 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2728 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2729 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2731 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2732 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2733 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2735 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2737 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2740 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2742 ** Configuration option
2744 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2745 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2749 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2750 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2754 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2755 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2756 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2759 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2760 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2761 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2762 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2763 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2764 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2765 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2768 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2772 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2773 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2774 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2776 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2777 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2779 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2781 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2782 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2783 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2784 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2786 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2788 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2789 not just the ones that reference directories
2791 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2792 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2794 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2795 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2796 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2798 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2799 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2800 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2801 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2802 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2803 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2805 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2810 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2811 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2813 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2815 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2817 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2819 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2820 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2822 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2823 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2825 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2827 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2831 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2833 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2835 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2836 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2837 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2838 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2839 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2841 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2842 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2844 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2845 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2847 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2848 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2850 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2851 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2852 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2856 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2857 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2858 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2859 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2860 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2861 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2862 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2863 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2864 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2865 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2866 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2867 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2868 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2869 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2871 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2873 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2874 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2876 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2878 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2880 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2881 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2883 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2885 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2886 without a trailing newline.
2888 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2889 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2891 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2894 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2898 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2900 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2902 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2903 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2904 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2905 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2907 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2909 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2910 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2911 be printed without leading spaces.
2913 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2914 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2919 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2920 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2921 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2923 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2925 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2926 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2928 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2929 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2931 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2932 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2934 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2936 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2938 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2940 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2941 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2943 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2945 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2947 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2948 byte offsets are specified.
2951 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2954 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2957 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2958 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2959 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2960 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2961 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2962 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2963 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2964 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2965 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2966 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2967 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2968 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2969 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2970 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2971 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2972 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2973 directory where M has write access.
2974 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2975 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2976 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2979 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2980 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2981 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2982 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2983 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2984 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2985 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2986 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2987 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2988 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2989 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2990 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2991 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2992 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2993 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2994 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2995 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2996 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2997 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2998 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2999 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3000 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3001 appeared one additional time.
3003 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3004 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3005 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3006 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3009 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
3010 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3011 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3012 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3013 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3014 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3015 if there were more than 338.
3017 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3018 - false --help now exits nonzero
3021 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3022 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3023 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3024 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3027 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3028 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
3029 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
3030 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3031 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3034 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3035 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3036 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3037 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
3038 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3039 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3040 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3043 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3044 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3045 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3046 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3047 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3048 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3050 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3051 under certain unusual conditions
3052 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3053 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3056 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3057 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3058 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3059 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3060 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3061 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
3062 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3063 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3064 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
3065 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
3066 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3067 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3068 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3069 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3070 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3071 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3074 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3075 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3078 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3079 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3080 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3081 involving hard-linked directories
3082 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3083 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
3084 character-special and block files
3087 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3088 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3089 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3090 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3091 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3092 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3093 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3094 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3095 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3097 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
3098 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
3099 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3100 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3101 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3102 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3103 specified on the command line.
3104 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3105 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
3106 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3107 the first file untouched.
3108 * readlink: new program
3109 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3110 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3111 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3112 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3113 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3114 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3117 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3118 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3119 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3120 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3121 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3122 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3123 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3124 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3125 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3126 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3127 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3128 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3130 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3131 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3132 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3134 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3135 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3136 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3137 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3138 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3139 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3140 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3141 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3144 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3145 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3148 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3149 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3150 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3151 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3152 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3153 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3154 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3157 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3158 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3160 ========================================================================
3161 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3162 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3165 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3167 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3168 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3169 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3170 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3171 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3172 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3173 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3174 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3175 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3176 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3177 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3178 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3180 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3181 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3182 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3183 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3185 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3188 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3190 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3191 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3192 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3193 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3194 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3195 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3196 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3199 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3200 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3201 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3202 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3203 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3204 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3205 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3206 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3207 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3208 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3209 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3210 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3211 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3212 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3213 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3214 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3216 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3217 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3219 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3220 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3221 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3222 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3223 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3224 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3226 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3227 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3228 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3229 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3230 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3231 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3232 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3234 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3235 the source files in the following example:
3236 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3237 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3238 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3239 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3240 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3241 links between source files with --preserve=links
3242 * cp accepts new options:
3243 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3244 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3245 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3246 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3247 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3248 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3249 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3250 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3251 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3253 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3254 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3255 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3256 even though it's older than dest.
3257 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3258 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3259 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3260 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3261 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3263 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3264 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3265 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3266 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3267 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3268 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3269 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3271 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3272 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3273 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3275 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3276 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3277 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3278 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3279 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3280 This is the default.
3282 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3283 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3284 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3285 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3286 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3288 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3291 ========================================================================
3292 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3293 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3296 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3297 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3299 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3300 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3301 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3302 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3303 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3305 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3306 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3307 that specifies a non-directory
3310 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3311 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3312 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3313 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3314 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3315 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3316 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3317 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3318 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3319 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3320 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3321 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3322 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3323 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3324 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3325 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3326 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3327 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3328 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3329 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3330 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3331 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3332 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3333 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3335 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3336 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3337 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3339 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3341 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3342 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3344 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3345 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3346 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3347 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3348 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3350 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3351 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3352 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3353 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3354 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3356 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3358 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3359 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3360 * still more portability fixes
3361 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3362 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3364 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3366 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3368 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3370 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3371 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3372 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3373 there is any time remaining
3374 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3376 ========================================================================
3377 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3378 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3380 This package began as the union of the following:
3381 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3383 ========================================================================
3385 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3387 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3388 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3389 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3390 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3391 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3392 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.