1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8+ (????-??-??) [not-unstable]
7 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
8 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
9 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
11 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
15 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
16 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
18 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
19 support but with insufficient /proc support.
21 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
22 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
24 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
25 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
26 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
27 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
28 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
29 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
31 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
32 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
35 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
36 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
38 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
41 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
42 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
43 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
45 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
46 directory is unreadable.
48 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
49 Before it would print nothing.
51 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
55 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
56 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
57 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
59 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
60 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
61 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
62 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
65 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
69 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
70 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
71 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
72 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
73 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
74 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
75 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
77 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
78 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
79 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
80 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
81 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
82 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
83 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
84 This bug affects coreutils 6.0 through 6.6.
86 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
87 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
88 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
91 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
95 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
96 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
98 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
99 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
100 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
102 ** Improved robustness
104 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
105 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
106 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
109 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
113 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
114 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
115 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
116 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
117 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
119 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
123 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
126 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
130 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
131 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
132 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
133 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
135 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
136 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
138 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
139 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
140 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
143 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
145 ** Improved robustness
147 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
148 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
150 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
151 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
152 or NFS-mounted partition.
154 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
155 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
159 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
160 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
161 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
162 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
163 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
164 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
166 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
167 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
169 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
170 or neglect to report file removal.
172 For the "groups" command:
174 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
175 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
177 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
179 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
181 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
185 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
186 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
189 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
191 ** Changes in behavior
193 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
194 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
195 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
196 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
198 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
199 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
200 a final `./' or `../' component.
202 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
203 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
206 ** Infrastructure changes
208 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
209 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
210 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
211 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
215 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
218 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
219 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
220 dirent.d_type support.
222 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
223 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
225 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
226 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
227 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
228 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
231 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
233 ** Changes in behavior
235 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
239 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
240 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
244 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
245 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
246 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
248 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
249 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
251 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
252 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
254 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
256 ** Improved robustness
258 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
259 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
260 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
262 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
263 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
266 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
267 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
269 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
270 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
272 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
273 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
275 ** Changes in behavior
277 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
278 where the two are distinct.
280 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
281 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
282 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
283 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
284 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
285 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
286 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
287 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
288 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
289 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
290 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
291 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
292 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
293 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
294 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
295 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
296 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
298 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
299 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
300 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
302 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
303 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
304 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
305 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
308 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
309 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
313 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
314 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
315 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
316 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
318 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
319 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
320 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
322 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
323 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
324 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
325 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
326 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
329 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
330 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
332 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
333 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
334 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
335 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
337 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
338 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
339 successful and the output is easier to parse.
341 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
342 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
343 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
344 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
346 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
347 and sticky) with the -m option.
349 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
350 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
351 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
352 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
353 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
355 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
356 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
358 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
362 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
363 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
364 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
365 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
367 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
369 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
371 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
372 silently ignoring one of them.
374 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
375 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
376 containing this change was 5.92.
378 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
379 automatically newline terminated.
381 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
382 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
383 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
384 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
387 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
388 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
389 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
392 ** Scheduled for removal
394 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
395 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
397 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
398 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
399 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
400 command to unlink a directory.
402 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
403 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
404 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
405 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
409 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
410 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
411 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
412 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
413 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
414 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
418 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
419 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
421 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
423 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
424 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
425 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
427 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
428 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
431 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
432 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
434 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
435 list directories before files.
437 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
438 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
439 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
440 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
443 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
445 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
447 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
448 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
449 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
451 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
452 list of NUL-terminated file names.
456 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
457 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
458 usually printing nothing.
460 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
462 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
463 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
464 them with hard-linked directories.
466 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
467 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
468 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
470 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
471 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
472 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
474 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
477 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
478 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
480 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
481 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
483 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
484 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
486 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
487 all command-line arguments.
489 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
491 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
493 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
494 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
496 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
498 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
499 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
500 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
501 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
502 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
504 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
505 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
507 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
508 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
509 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
510 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
512 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
514 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
518 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
519 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
521 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
522 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
524 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
525 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
527 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
528 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
530 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
531 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
533 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
535 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
536 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
537 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
540 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
542 ** Build-related bug fixes
544 installing .mo files would fail
547 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
551 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
553 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
556 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
560 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
561 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
565 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
567 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
568 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
570 ** Deprecated options
572 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
573 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
575 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
579 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
581 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
582 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
583 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
584 conforming to older POSIX versions.
586 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
589 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
595 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
600 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
602 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
604 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
605 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
606 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
608 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
609 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
610 problematic usages. These include:
612 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
613 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
614 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
615 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
616 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
617 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
618 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
619 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
620 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
622 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
623 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
625 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
626 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
627 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
628 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
630 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
631 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
632 between binary and text files.
634 The following programs now always use text input/output:
638 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
642 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
643 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
646 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
648 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
649 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
651 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
652 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
653 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
655 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
657 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
659 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
660 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
661 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
665 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
667 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
668 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
670 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
671 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
672 blocks until F contains N blocks.
676 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
677 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
681 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
682 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
683 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
687 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
688 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
692 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
694 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
696 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
700 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
701 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
702 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
704 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
705 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
706 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
707 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
708 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
710 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
714 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
715 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
716 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
718 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
720 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
721 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
722 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
723 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
725 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
727 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
728 rather than silently wrapping around.
730 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
731 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
733 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
734 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
736 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
737 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
738 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
741 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
743 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
745 ** Improved robustness
747 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
748 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
749 no matter how large the result.
751 ** Improved portability
753 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
754 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
756 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
758 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
759 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
760 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
762 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
763 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
767 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
768 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
770 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
772 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
773 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
774 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
775 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
777 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
778 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
780 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
781 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
782 categories if not specified by dircolors.
784 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
786 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
787 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
789 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
790 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
792 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
794 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
795 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
797 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
798 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
800 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
801 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
802 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
804 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
806 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
808 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
812 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
814 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
815 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
816 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
818 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
819 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
821 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
822 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
823 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
825 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
826 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
828 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
829 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
830 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
831 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
833 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
834 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
836 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
837 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
838 the file system does not support it.
840 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
842 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
843 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
845 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
847 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
848 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
850 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
851 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
852 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
853 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
855 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
856 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
859 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
860 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
861 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
862 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
864 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
865 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
866 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
867 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
869 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
870 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
872 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
874 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
875 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
876 reporting incorrect results.
880 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
881 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
883 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
886 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
888 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
889 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
891 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
892 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
894 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
897 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
898 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
899 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
900 the file name does not look like a page range.
902 printf has several changes:
904 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
905 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
907 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
908 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
909 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
911 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
912 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
915 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
916 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
918 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
919 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
921 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
923 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
924 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
926 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
928 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
930 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
931 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
932 when first encountering the directory.
936 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
937 output; POSIX requires this.
939 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
940 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
942 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
944 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
945 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
947 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
948 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
950 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
951 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
952 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
953 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
954 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
955 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
956 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
958 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
959 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
960 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
962 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
963 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
965 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
967 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
969 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
970 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
971 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
972 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
974 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
978 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
979 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
980 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
981 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
982 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
984 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
985 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
986 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
988 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
989 is longer than PATH_MAX.
991 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
992 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
994 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
995 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
996 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
997 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
998 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
1000 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
1001 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
1003 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
1004 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
1006 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
1008 nocreat do not create the output file
1009 excl fail if the output file already exists
1010 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
1011 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
1013 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
1015 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
1016 direct use direct I/O for data
1017 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
1018 sync likewise, but also for metadata
1019 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
1020 nofollow do not follow symlinks
1021 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
1023 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
1025 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
1026 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
1029 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
1030 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
1031 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
1032 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
1033 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
1034 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
1036 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1037 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1039 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
1042 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
1044 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
1046 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
1047 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
1049 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
1050 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
1051 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
1053 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
1054 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
1055 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
1057 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
1059 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
1060 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
1062 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
1063 for compatibility with bash.
1065 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
1067 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
1068 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
1069 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
1070 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
1072 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
1073 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
1075 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
1076 ls supports TABSIZE.
1077 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
1078 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
1079 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
1081 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
1084 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
1086 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
1087 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
1088 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
1089 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
1090 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
1091 an offset, not as a file name.
1093 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
1094 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
1096 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
1097 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
1099 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
1100 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
1102 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
1103 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
1104 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
1106 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
1107 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
1109 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
1110 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
1114 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
1116 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
1118 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
1122 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
1123 or more arguments between partitions.
1125 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
1126 holes in the destination.
1128 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
1129 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
1130 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
1131 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
1132 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
1133 terminates immediately.
1135 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
1137 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
1139 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
1140 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
1141 not the empty string.
1143 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
1144 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
1148 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
1149 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
1150 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
1153 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
1160 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
1164 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
1165 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
1167 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
1168 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
1170 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
1171 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
1172 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
1175 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
1179 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
1180 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
1182 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
1183 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
1185 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
1186 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
1187 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
1189 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
1191 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
1194 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
1196 ** Configuration option
1198 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
1199 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
1203 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
1204 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
1208 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
1209 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
1210 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
1213 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
1214 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
1215 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
1216 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
1217 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
1218 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
1219 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
1222 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
1226 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
1227 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
1228 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
1230 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
1231 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
1233 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
1235 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
1236 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
1237 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
1238 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
1240 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
1242 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
1243 not just the ones that reference directories
1245 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
1246 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
1248 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
1249 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
1250 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
1252 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
1253 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
1254 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
1255 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
1256 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
1257 ragged when a datum was too wide.
1259 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
1264 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
1265 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
1267 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
1269 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
1271 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
1273 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
1274 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
1276 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
1277 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
1279 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
1281 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
1285 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
1287 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
1289 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
1290 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
1291 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
1292 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
1293 resolution is the best we can do right now.
1295 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
1296 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
1298 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
1299 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
1301 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
1302 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
1304 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
1305 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
1306 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
1310 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
1311 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
1312 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
1313 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
1314 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
1315 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
1316 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
1317 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
1318 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
1319 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
1320 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
1321 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
1322 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
1323 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
1325 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
1327 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
1328 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
1330 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
1332 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
1334 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
1335 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
1337 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
1339 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
1340 without a trailing newline.
1342 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
1343 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
1345 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
1348 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
1352 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
1354 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
1356 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
1357 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
1358 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
1359 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
1361 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
1363 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
1364 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
1365 be printed without leading spaces.
1367 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
1368 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
1373 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
1374 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
1375 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
1377 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
1379 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
1380 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
1382 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
1383 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
1385 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
1386 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
1388 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
1390 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
1392 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
1394 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
1395 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
1397 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
1399 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
1401 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
1402 byte offsets are specified.
1405 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
1408 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
1411 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
1412 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
1413 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
1414 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
1415 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
1416 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
1417 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
1418 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
1419 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
1420 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
1421 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
1422 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
1423 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
1424 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
1425 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
1426 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
1427 directory where M has write access.
1428 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
1429 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
1430 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
1433 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
1434 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
1435 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
1436 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
1437 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
1438 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
1439 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
1440 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
1441 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
1442 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
1443 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
1444 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
1445 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
1446 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
1447 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
1448 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
1449 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
1450 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
1451 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
1452 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
1453 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
1454 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
1455 appeared one additional time.
1457 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
1458 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
1459 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
1460 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
1463 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
1464 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
1465 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
1466 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
1467 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
1468 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
1469 if there were more than 338.
1471 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
1472 - false --help now exits nonzero
1475 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
1476 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
1477 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
1478 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
1481 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
1482 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
1483 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
1484 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
1485 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
1488 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
1489 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
1490 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
1491 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
1492 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
1493 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
1494 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
1497 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
1498 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
1499 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
1500 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
1501 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
1502 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
1504 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
1505 under certain unusual conditions
1506 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
1507 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
1510 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
1511 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
1512 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
1513 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
1514 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
1515 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
1516 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
1517 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
1518 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
1519 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
1520 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
1521 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
1522 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
1523 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
1524 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
1525 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
1528 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
1529 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
1532 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
1533 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
1534 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
1535 involving hard-linked directories
1536 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
1537 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
1538 character-special and block files
1541 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
1542 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
1543 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
1544 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
1545 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
1546 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
1547 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
1548 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
1549 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
1551 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
1552 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
1553 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
1554 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
1555 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
1556 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
1557 specified on the command line.
1558 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
1559 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
1560 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
1561 the first file untouched.
1562 * readlink: new program
1563 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
1564 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
1565 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
1566 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
1567 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
1568 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
1571 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
1572 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
1573 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
1574 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
1575 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
1576 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
1577 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
1578 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
1579 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
1580 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
1581 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
1582 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
1584 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
1585 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
1586 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
1588 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
1589 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
1590 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
1591 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
1592 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
1593 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
1594 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
1595 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
1598 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
1599 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
1602 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
1603 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
1604 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
1605 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
1606 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
1607 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
1608 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
1611 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
1612 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
1614 ========================================================================
1615 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
1616 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
1619 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
1621 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
1622 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
1623 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
1624 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
1625 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
1626 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
1627 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
1628 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
1629 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
1630 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
1631 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
1632 The old options will continue to work for a while.
1634 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
1635 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
1636 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
1637 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
1639 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
1642 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
1644 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
1645 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
1646 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
1647 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
1648 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
1649 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
1650 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
1653 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
1654 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
1655 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
1656 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
1657 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
1658 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
1659 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
1660 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
1661 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
1662 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
1663 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
1664 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
1665 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
1666 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
1667 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
1668 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
1670 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
1671 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
1673 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
1674 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
1675 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
1676 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
1677 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
1678 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
1680 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
1681 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
1682 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
1683 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
1684 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
1685 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
1686 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
1688 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
1689 the source files in the following example:
1690 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
1691 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
1692 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
1693 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
1694 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
1695 links between source files with --preserve=links
1696 * cp accepts new options:
1697 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
1698 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
1699 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
1700 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
1701 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
1702 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
1703 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
1704 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
1705 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
1707 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
1708 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
1709 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
1710 even though it's older than dest.
1711 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
1712 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
1713 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
1714 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
1715 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
1717 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
1718 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
1719 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
1720 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
1721 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
1722 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
1723 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
1725 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
1726 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
1727 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
1729 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
1730 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
1731 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
1732 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
1733 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
1734 This is the default.
1736 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
1737 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
1738 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
1739 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
1740 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
1742 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
1745 ========================================================================
1746 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
1747 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
1750 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
1751 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
1753 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
1754 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
1755 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
1756 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
1757 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
1759 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
1760 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
1761 that specifies a non-directory
1764 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
1765 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
1766 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
1767 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
1768 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
1769 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
1770 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
1771 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
1772 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
1773 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
1774 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
1775 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
1776 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
1777 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
1778 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
1779 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
1780 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
1781 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
1782 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
1783 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
1784 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
1785 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
1786 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
1787 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
1789 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
1790 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
1791 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
1793 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
1795 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
1796 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
1798 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
1799 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
1800 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
1801 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
1802 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
1804 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
1805 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
1806 required support; from Bruno Haible.
1807 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
1808 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
1810 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
1812 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
1813 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
1814 * still more portability fixes
1815 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
1816 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
1818 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
1820 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
1822 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
1824 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
1825 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
1826 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
1827 there is any time remaining
1828 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
1830 ========================================================================
1831 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
1832 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
1834 This package began as the union of the following:
1835 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
1837 ========================================================================
1839 Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 Free Software
1842 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
1843 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
1844 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
1845 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
1846 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
1847 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.