1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
8 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
10 ** Changes in behavior
12 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
13 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
16 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
20 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
21 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
22 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
24 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
25 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
27 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
28 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
29 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
31 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
32 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
34 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
35 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
37 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
38 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
39 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
41 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
42 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
43 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
44 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
48 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
49 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
51 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
54 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
55 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
57 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
59 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
60 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
61 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
63 ** Changes in behavior
65 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
66 rather than its aliased target.
68 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
69 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
70 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
72 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
73 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
74 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
75 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
76 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
77 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
78 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
79 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
81 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
83 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
85 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
86 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
89 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
90 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
91 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
92 control like taskset for example.
94 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
96 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
97 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
98 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
99 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
100 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
101 includes %C when context information is available.
103 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
104 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
105 rather than a file system attribute.
107 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
108 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
109 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
110 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
112 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
113 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
114 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
116 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
117 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
118 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
121 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
125 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
126 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
128 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
130 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
131 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
133 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
134 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
135 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
136 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
138 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
139 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
140 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
144 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
145 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
147 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
148 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
149 duration after the initial signal was sent.
151 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
152 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
153 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
154 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
155 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
156 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
157 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
158 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
159 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
161 ** Changes in behavior
163 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
164 sequence when it would be a no-op.
166 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
167 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
170 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
174 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
175 of available processors, which may not have been the case
176 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
177 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
181 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
182 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
184 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
185 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
186 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
187 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
189 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
190 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
191 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
194 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
198 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
199 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
200 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
202 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
203 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
204 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
206 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
207 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
209 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
210 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
211 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
212 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
214 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
215 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
216 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
218 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
219 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
220 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
221 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
223 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
224 renamed-aside and then recreated.
225 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
227 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
228 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
229 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
230 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
232 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
233 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
234 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
236 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
237 processes will not intersperse their output.
238 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
241 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
245 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
246 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
248 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
249 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
251 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
252 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
253 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
254 the presence of the empty string argument.
255 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
257 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
258 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
259 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
260 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
262 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
263 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
265 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
266 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
267 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
269 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
270 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
271 and with a malicious user on the same system
272 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
273 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
276 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
280 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
281 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
282 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
284 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
285 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
286 offending directory and all "contents."
288 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
289 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
290 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
292 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
293 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
294 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
296 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
297 processes will not intersperse their output.
298 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
299 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
301 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
302 output the name of the file to stdout.
303 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
305 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
306 call fails with errno == EACCES.
307 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
309 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
310 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
313 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
314 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
315 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
317 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
318 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
319 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
320 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
321 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
322 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
324 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
325 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
326 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
327 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
329 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
330 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
332 ** Changes in behavior
334 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
335 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
336 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
337 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
338 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
340 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
341 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
342 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
343 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
345 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
347 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
348 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
349 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
350 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
351 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
355 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
359 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
360 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
362 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
363 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
365 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
366 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
367 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
369 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
370 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
373 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
377 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
378 when the source file doesn't have write access.
379 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
381 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
382 to accommodate leap seconds.
383 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
385 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
386 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
387 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
389 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
391 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
392 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
393 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
395 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
396 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
397 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
398 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
399 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
403 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
404 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
405 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
406 directory or a symlink to a directory.
408 ** Changes in behavior
410 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
411 environment variable is set.
413 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
414 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
415 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
419 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
420 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
421 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
422 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
424 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
425 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
426 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
427 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
431 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
432 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
433 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
435 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
436 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
437 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
438 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
439 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
440 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
443 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
444 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
447 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
451 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
452 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
453 and libraries tested at configure time.
454 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
456 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
457 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
459 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
460 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
462 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
463 printing a summary to stderr.
464 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
466 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
467 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
468 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
470 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
471 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
473 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
474 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
475 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
476 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
478 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
479 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
480 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
481 which is relatively unusual.
482 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
484 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
485 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
486 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
487 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
488 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
489 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
490 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
494 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
495 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
496 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
497 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
498 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
502 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
503 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
505 ** Changes in behavior
507 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
508 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
509 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
510 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
511 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
514 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
518 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
519 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
521 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
522 before data copying has started.
524 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
525 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
527 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
528 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
529 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
530 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
532 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
533 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
534 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
535 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
537 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
542 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
543 for its standard streams.
545 ** Changes in behavior
547 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
548 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
549 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
550 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
551 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
552 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
554 ** Deprecated options
556 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
557 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
561 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
563 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
564 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
567 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
569 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
570 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
572 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
573 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
576 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
580 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
581 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
582 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
583 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
585 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
586 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
587 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
588 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
589 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
594 make check: two tests have been corrected
598 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
599 inherited from gnulib.
602 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
606 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
607 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
608 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
609 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
611 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
612 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
614 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
616 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
617 systems without xattr support.
619 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
620 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
621 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
623 ** Changes in behavior
625 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
626 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
627 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
628 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
630 ** Improved robustness
632 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
633 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
634 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
635 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
636 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
637 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
638 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
639 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
640 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
644 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
645 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
647 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
648 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
649 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
650 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
651 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
654 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
658 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
659 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
660 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
664 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
665 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
666 data was read, or on process exit.
667 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
669 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
670 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
671 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
672 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
674 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
675 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
676 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
677 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
679 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
680 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
682 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
683 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
685 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
686 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
687 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
689 ** Changes in behavior
691 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
692 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
693 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
695 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
696 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
698 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
699 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
700 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
703 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
707 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
709 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
710 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
711 install: Never copies xattrs
713 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
714 from overwriting any existing destination file
716 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
717 mode where this feature is available.
719 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
720 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
721 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
722 do not modify the destination at all.
724 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
726 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
730 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
731 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
733 cp uses much less memory in some situations
735 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
736 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
738 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
739 processing the first file name
741 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
742 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
743 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
744 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
746 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
747 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
749 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
750 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
753 ** Changes in behavior
755 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
756 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
758 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
759 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
760 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
762 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
763 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
765 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
767 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
768 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
769 is still marked with a '+'.
772 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
776 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
777 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
781 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
782 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
783 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
784 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
785 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
786 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
788 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
789 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
791 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
792 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
794 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
796 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
797 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
798 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
800 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
801 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
803 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
804 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
805 used to factor large numbers.
807 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
810 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
812 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
814 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
815 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
817 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
818 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
819 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
820 maximum command-line (argv) length.
822 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
823 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
824 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
826 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
827 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
831 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
833 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
834 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
836 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
837 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
839 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
841 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
842 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
846 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
847 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
848 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
850 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
852 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
853 no matter how many files are in a given directory
855 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
856 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
857 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
859 ** Changes in behavior
861 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
862 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
865 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
869 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
871 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
872 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
873 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
875 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
876 with no USERNAME argument.
878 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
879 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
880 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
882 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
883 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
884 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
885 number of fields for some inputs.
887 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
888 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
890 ** Changes in behavior
892 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
893 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
896 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
900 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
902 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
903 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
904 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
905 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
907 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
908 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
910 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
911 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
913 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
914 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
916 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
917 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
918 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
919 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
921 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
922 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
923 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
924 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
925 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
926 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
928 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
929 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
931 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
932 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
933 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
935 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
936 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
938 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
939 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
941 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
942 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
943 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
944 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
946 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
947 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
949 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
950 in more cases when a directory is empty.
952 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
953 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
954 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
958 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
959 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
961 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
962 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
963 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
964 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
968 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
969 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
971 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
973 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
977 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
978 which have negative errno values.
982 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
986 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
990 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
991 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
994 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
998 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
999 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1000 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1002 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1003 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1004 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1005 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1009 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1010 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1011 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1012 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1015 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1019 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1021 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1022 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1023 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1026 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1030 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1031 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1033 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1035 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1037 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1039 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1043 ** Changes in behavior
1045 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1046 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1048 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1049 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1051 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1052 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1053 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1057 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1058 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1059 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1060 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1061 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1062 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1063 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1064 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1065 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1066 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1067 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1069 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1070 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1071 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1074 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1077 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1078 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1079 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1081 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1082 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1083 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1086 ** New build options
1088 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1089 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1090 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1091 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1093 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1094 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1095 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1096 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1097 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1098 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1099 of "make check" fail.
1101 ** Remove deprecated options
1103 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1104 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1105 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1106 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1107 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1109 ** Improved robustness
1111 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1112 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1113 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1114 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1115 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1116 loss of the contents of a/f.
1118 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1119 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1123 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1124 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1125 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1127 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1128 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1129 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1130 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1132 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1133 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1134 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1135 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1136 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1137 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1138 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1139 destination is a symlink.
1141 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1143 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1144 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1146 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1147 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1149 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1151 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1152 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1154 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1155 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1157 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1160 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1161 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1163 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1164 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1166 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1167 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1168 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1169 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1171 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1172 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1173 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1175 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1176 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1177 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1179 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1180 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1181 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1182 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1184 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1185 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1186 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1188 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1189 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1191 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1192 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1194 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1196 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1197 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1198 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1200 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1201 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1203 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1204 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1206 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1207 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1209 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1210 [present in the original version]
1213 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1217 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1219 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1220 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1221 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1223 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1224 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1226 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1230 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1231 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1233 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1234 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1236 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1237 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1239 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1240 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1241 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1242 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1243 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1244 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1246 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1247 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1250 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1251 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1253 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1256 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1257 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1258 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1260 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1261 directory is unreadable.
1263 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1264 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1265 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1267 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1268 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1269 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1270 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1271 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1274 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1275 Before it would print nothing.
1277 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1279 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1280 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1281 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1282 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1283 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1284 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1285 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1286 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1288 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1292 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1293 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1294 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1296 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1297 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1298 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1299 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1302 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1306 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1307 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1308 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1309 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1310 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1311 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1312 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1314 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1315 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1316 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1317 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1318 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1319 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1320 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1321 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1323 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1324 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1325 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1328 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1332 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1333 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1335 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1336 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1337 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1339 ** Improved robustness
1341 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1342 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1343 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1346 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1350 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1351 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1352 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1353 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1354 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1356 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1360 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1363 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1367 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1368 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1369 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1370 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1372 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1373 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1375 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1376 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1377 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1380 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1382 ** Improved robustness
1384 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1385 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1387 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1388 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1389 or NFS-mounted partition.
1391 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1392 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1396 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1397 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1398 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1399 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1400 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1401 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1403 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1404 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1406 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1407 or neglect to report file removal.
1409 For the "groups" command:
1411 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1412 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1414 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1416 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1418 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1422 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1423 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1426 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1428 ** Changes in behavior
1430 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1431 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1432 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1433 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1435 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1436 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1437 a final `./' or `../' component.
1439 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1440 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1441 this only for pipes.
1443 ** Infrastructure changes
1445 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1446 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1447 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1448 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1452 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1453 name is "." or "..".
1455 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1456 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1457 dirent.d_type support.
1459 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1460 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1462 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1463 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1464 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1465 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1468 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1470 ** Changes in behavior
1472 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1476 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1477 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1481 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1482 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1483 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1485 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1486 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1488 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1489 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1491 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1493 ** Improved robustness
1495 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1496 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1497 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1499 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1500 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1503 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1504 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1506 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1507 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1509 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1510 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1512 ** Changes in behavior
1514 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1515 where the two are distinct.
1517 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1518 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1519 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1520 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1521 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1522 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1523 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1524 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1525 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1526 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1527 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1528 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1529 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1530 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1531 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1532 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1533 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1535 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1536 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1537 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1539 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1540 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1541 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1542 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1545 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1546 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1550 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1551 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1552 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1553 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1555 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1556 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1557 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1559 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1560 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1561 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1562 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1563 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1566 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1567 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1569 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1570 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1571 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1572 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1574 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1575 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1576 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1578 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1579 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1580 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1581 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1583 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1584 and sticky) with the -m option.
1586 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1587 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1588 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1589 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1590 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1592 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1593 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1595 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1599 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1600 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1601 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1602 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1604 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1606 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1608 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1609 silently ignoring one of them.
1611 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1612 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1613 containing this change was 5.92.
1615 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1616 automatically newline terminated.
1618 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1619 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1620 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1621 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1624 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1625 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1626 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1629 ** Scheduled for removal
1631 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1632 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1634 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1635 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1636 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1637 command to unlink a directory.
1639 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1640 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1641 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1642 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1646 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1647 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1648 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1649 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1650 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1651 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1655 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1656 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1658 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1660 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1661 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1662 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1664 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1665 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1668 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1669 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1671 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1672 list directories before files.
1674 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1675 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1676 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1677 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1680 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1682 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1684 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1685 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1686 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1688 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1689 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1693 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1694 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1695 usually printing nothing.
1697 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1699 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1700 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1701 them with hard-linked directories.
1703 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1704 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1705 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1707 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1708 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1709 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1711 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1714 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1715 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1717 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1718 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1720 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1721 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1723 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1724 all command-line arguments.
1726 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1728 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1730 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1731 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1733 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1735 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1736 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1737 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1738 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1739 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1741 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1742 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1744 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1745 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1746 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1747 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1749 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1751 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1755 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1756 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1758 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1759 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1761 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1762 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1764 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1765 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1767 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1768 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1770 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1772 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1773 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1774 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1777 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1779 ** Build-related bug fixes
1781 installing .mo files would fail
1784 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1788 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1790 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1793 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1797 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1798 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1802 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1804 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1805 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1807 ** Deprecated options
1809 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1810 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1812 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1816 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1818 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1819 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1820 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1821 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1823 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1826 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1832 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1837 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1839 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1841 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1842 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1843 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1845 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1846 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1847 problematic usages. These include:
1849 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1850 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1851 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1852 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1853 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1854 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1855 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1856 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1857 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1859 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1860 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1862 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1863 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1864 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1865 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1867 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1868 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1869 between binary and text files.
1871 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1875 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1879 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1880 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1882 head tac tail tee tr
1883 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1885 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1886 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1888 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1889 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1890 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1892 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1894 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1896 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1897 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1898 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1902 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1904 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1905 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1907 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1908 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1909 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1913 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1914 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1918 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1919 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1920 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1924 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1925 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1929 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1931 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1933 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1937 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1938 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1939 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1941 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1942 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1943 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1944 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1945 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1947 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
1951 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
1952 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
1953 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
1955 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
1957 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
1958 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
1959 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
1960 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
1962 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
1964 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
1965 rather than silently wrapping around.
1967 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
1968 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
1970 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
1971 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
1973 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
1974 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
1975 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
1976 file /tmp/a/b/file".
1978 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
1980 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
1982 ** Improved robustness
1984 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
1985 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
1986 no matter how large the result.
1988 ** Improved portability
1990 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
1991 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
1993 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
1995 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
1996 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
1997 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
1999 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2000 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2004 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2005 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2007 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2009 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2010 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2011 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2012 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2014 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2015 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2017 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2018 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2019 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2021 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2023 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2024 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2026 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2027 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2029 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2031 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2032 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2034 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2035 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2037 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2038 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2039 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2041 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2043 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2045 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2049 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2051 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2052 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2053 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2055 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2056 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2058 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2059 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2060 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2062 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2063 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2065 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2066 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2067 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2068 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2070 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2071 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2073 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2074 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2075 the file system does not support it.
2077 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2079 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2080 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2082 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2084 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2085 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2087 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2088 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2089 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2090 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2092 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2093 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2096 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2097 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2098 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2099 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2101 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2102 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2103 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2104 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2106 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2107 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2109 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2111 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2112 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2113 reporting incorrect results.
2117 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2118 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2120 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2123 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2125 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2126 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2128 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2129 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2131 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2134 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2135 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2136 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2137 the file name does not look like a page range.
2139 printf has several changes:
2141 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2142 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2144 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2145 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2146 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2148 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2149 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2152 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2153 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2155 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2156 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2158 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2160 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2161 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2163 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2165 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2167 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2168 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2169 when first encountering the directory.
2173 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2174 output; POSIX requires this.
2176 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2177 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2179 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2181 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2182 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2184 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2185 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2187 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2188 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2189 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2190 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2191 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2192 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2193 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2195 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2196 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2197 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2199 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2200 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2202 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2204 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2206 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2207 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2208 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2209 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2211 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2215 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2216 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2217 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2218 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2219 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2221 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2222 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2223 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2225 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2226 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2228 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2229 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2231 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2232 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2233 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2234 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2235 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2237 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2238 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2240 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2241 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2243 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2245 nocreat do not create the output file
2246 excl fail if the output file already exists
2247 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2248 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2250 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2252 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2253 direct use direct I/O for data
2254 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2255 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2256 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2257 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2258 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2260 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2262 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2263 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2266 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2267 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2268 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2269 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2270 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2271 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2273 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2274 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2276 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2279 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2281 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2283 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2284 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2286 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2287 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2288 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2290 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2291 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2292 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2294 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2296 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2297 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2299 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2300 for compatibility with bash.
2302 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2304 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2305 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2306 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2307 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2309 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2310 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2312 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2313 ls supports TABSIZE.
2314 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2315 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2316 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2318 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2321 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2323 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2324 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2325 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2326 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2327 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2328 an offset, not as a file name.
2330 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2331 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2333 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2334 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2336 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2337 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2339 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2340 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2341 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2343 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2344 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2346 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2347 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2351 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2353 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2355 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2359 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2360 or more arguments between partitions.
2362 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2363 holes in the destination.
2365 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2366 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2367 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2368 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2369 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2370 terminates immediately.
2372 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2374 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2376 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2377 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2378 not the empty string.
2380 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2381 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2385 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2386 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2387 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2390 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2397 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2401 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2402 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2404 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2405 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2407 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2408 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2409 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2412 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2416 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2417 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2419 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2420 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2422 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2423 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2424 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2426 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2428 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2431 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2433 ** Configuration option
2435 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2436 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2440 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2441 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2445 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2446 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2447 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2450 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2451 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2452 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2453 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2454 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2455 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2456 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2459 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2463 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2464 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2465 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2467 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2468 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2470 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2472 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2473 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2474 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2475 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2477 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2479 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2480 not just the ones that reference directories
2482 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2483 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2485 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2486 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2487 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2489 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2490 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2491 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2492 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2493 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2494 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2496 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2501 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2502 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2504 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2506 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2508 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2510 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2511 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2513 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2514 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2516 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2518 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2522 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2524 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2526 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2527 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2528 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2529 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2530 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2532 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2533 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2535 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2536 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2538 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2539 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2541 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2542 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2543 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2547 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2548 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2549 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2550 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2551 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2552 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2553 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2554 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2555 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2556 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2557 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2558 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2559 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2560 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2562 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2564 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2565 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2567 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2569 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2571 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2572 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2574 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2576 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2577 without a trailing newline.
2579 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2580 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2582 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2585 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2589 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2591 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2593 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2594 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2595 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2596 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2598 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2600 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2601 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2602 be printed without leading spaces.
2604 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2605 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2610 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2611 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2612 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2614 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2616 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2617 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2619 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2620 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2622 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2623 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2625 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2627 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2629 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2631 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2632 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2634 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2636 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2638 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2639 byte offsets are specified.
2642 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2645 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2648 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2649 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2650 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2651 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2652 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2653 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2654 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2655 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2656 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2657 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2658 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2659 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2660 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2661 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2662 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2663 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2664 directory where M has write access.
2665 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2666 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2667 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2670 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2671 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2672 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2673 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2674 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2675 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2676 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2677 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2678 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2679 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2680 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2681 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2682 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2683 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2684 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2685 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2686 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2687 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2688 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2689 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2690 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2691 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2692 appeared one additional time.
2694 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2695 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2696 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2697 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2700 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2701 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2702 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2703 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2704 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2705 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2706 if there were more than 338.
2708 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2709 - false --help now exits nonzero
2712 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2713 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2714 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2715 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2718 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2719 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2720 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2721 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2722 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2725 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2726 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2727 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2728 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2729 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2730 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2731 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2734 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2735 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2736 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2737 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2738 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2739 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2741 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2742 under certain unusual conditions
2743 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2744 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2747 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2748 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2749 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2750 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2751 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2752 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2753 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2754 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2755 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2756 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2757 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2758 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2759 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2760 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2761 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2762 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2765 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2766 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2769 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2770 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2771 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2772 involving hard-linked directories
2773 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2774 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2775 character-special and block files
2778 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2779 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2780 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2781 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2782 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2783 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2784 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2785 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2786 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2788 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2789 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2790 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2791 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2792 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2793 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2794 specified on the command line.
2795 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2796 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2797 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2798 the first file untouched.
2799 * readlink: new program
2800 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2801 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2802 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2803 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2804 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2805 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2808 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2809 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2810 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2811 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2812 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2813 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2814 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2815 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2816 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2817 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2818 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2819 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2821 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2822 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2823 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2825 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2826 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2827 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2828 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2829 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2830 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2831 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2832 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2835 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2836 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2839 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2840 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2841 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2842 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2843 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2844 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2845 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2848 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2849 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2851 ========================================================================
2852 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2853 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2856 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2858 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2859 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2860 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2861 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2862 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2863 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2864 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2865 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2866 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2867 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2868 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2869 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2871 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2872 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2873 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2874 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2876 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2879 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2881 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2882 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2883 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2884 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2885 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2886 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2887 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2890 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2891 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2892 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2893 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2894 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2895 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2896 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2897 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2898 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2899 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2900 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2901 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2902 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2903 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2904 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2905 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2907 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2908 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2910 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2911 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2912 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2913 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2914 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2915 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2917 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2918 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2919 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2920 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2921 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2922 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2923 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2925 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2926 the source files in the following example:
2927 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2928 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2929 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2930 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2931 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2932 links between source files with --preserve=links
2933 * cp accepts new options:
2934 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2935 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2936 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2937 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2938 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2939 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2940 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2941 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2942 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2944 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2945 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2946 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2947 even though it's older than dest.
2948 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
2949 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
2950 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
2951 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
2952 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
2954 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
2955 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
2956 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
2957 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
2958 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
2959 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
2960 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
2962 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
2963 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
2964 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
2966 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
2967 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
2968 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
2969 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
2970 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
2971 This is the default.
2973 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
2974 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
2975 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
2976 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
2977 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
2979 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
2982 ========================================================================
2983 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
2984 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2987 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
2988 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
2990 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2991 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
2992 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
2993 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
2994 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
2996 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
2997 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
2998 that specifies a non-directory
3001 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3002 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3003 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3004 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3005 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3006 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3007 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3008 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3009 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3010 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3011 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3012 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3013 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3014 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3015 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3016 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3017 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3018 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3019 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3020 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3021 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3022 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3023 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3024 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3026 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3027 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3028 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3030 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3032 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3033 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3035 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3036 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3037 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3038 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3039 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3041 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3042 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3043 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3044 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3045 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3047 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3049 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3050 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3051 * still more portability fixes
3052 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3053 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3055 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3057 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3059 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3061 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3062 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3063 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3064 there is any time remaining
3065 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3067 ========================================================================
3068 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3069 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3071 This package began as the union of the following:
3072 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3074 ========================================================================
3076 Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3078 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3079 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3080 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3081 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3082 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3083 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.