1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
8 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
10 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
11 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
15 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
16 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
17 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
18 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
19 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
20 typically still point to one of the hard links.
22 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
23 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
24 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
25 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
26 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
30 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
31 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
32 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
35 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
39 realpath: print resolved file names.
43 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
44 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
46 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
47 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
49 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
50 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
51 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
52 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
53 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
54 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
56 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
57 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
58 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
60 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
61 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
62 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
64 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
65 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
66 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
67 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
68 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
70 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
72 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
73 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
75 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
76 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
77 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
79 ** Changes in behavior
81 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
82 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
83 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
84 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
85 usually-short referent instead.
87 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
88 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
89 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
90 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
93 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
97 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
98 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
99 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
101 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
102 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
104 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
105 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
109 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
110 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
112 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
113 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
114 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
115 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
117 ** Changes in behavior
119 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
120 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
121 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
125 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
126 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
127 only .tar.xz files is enough.
130 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
134 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
135 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
136 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
138 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
139 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
141 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
142 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
143 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
144 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
145 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
147 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
148 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
149 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
150 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
151 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
152 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
153 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
154 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
156 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
157 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
159 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
160 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
162 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
163 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
165 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
166 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
167 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
169 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
170 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
171 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
172 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
174 ** Changes in behavior
176 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
177 when -v or -c specified.
179 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
180 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
184 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
185 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
186 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
187 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
188 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
190 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
191 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
192 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
194 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
195 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
196 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
197 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
198 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
199 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
200 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
202 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
203 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
204 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
208 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
209 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
211 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
214 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
215 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
217 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
218 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
220 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
221 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
223 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
225 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
229 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
230 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
232 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
235 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
239 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
240 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
242 ** Changes in behavior
244 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
245 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
246 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
247 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
248 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
249 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
251 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
252 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
253 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
257 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
260 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
264 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
265 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
266 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
268 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
269 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
270 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
272 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
273 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
274 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
276 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
277 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
279 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
280 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
282 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
283 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
285 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
286 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
290 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
291 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
292 processed portion thereof.
294 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
295 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
297 ** Changes in behavior
299 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
300 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
301 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
303 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
304 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
305 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
307 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
308 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
310 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
311 Use --preserve-context instead.
313 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
316 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
320 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
321 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
322 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
323 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
324 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
326 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
327 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
329 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
330 reject file names invalid for that file system.
332 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
333 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
337 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
338 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
339 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
340 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
341 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
342 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
343 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
344 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
346 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
347 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
348 the same number of fields are output for each line.
350 ** Changes in behavior
352 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
353 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
354 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
357 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
361 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
362 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
363 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
366 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
370 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
371 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
373 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
374 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
376 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
377 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
379 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
380 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
381 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
382 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
384 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
385 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
387 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
388 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
389 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
391 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
393 ** Changes in behavior
395 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
396 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
397 to the number of available processors.
401 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
404 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
408 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
409 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
410 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
411 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
413 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
414 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
415 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
417 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
418 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
420 ** Changes in behavior
422 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
423 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
425 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
426 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
427 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
428 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
429 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
430 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
432 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
433 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
434 the same way as the others.
437 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
441 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
442 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
443 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
445 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
446 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
448 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
449 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
450 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
452 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
453 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
455 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
456 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
458 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
459 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
460 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
462 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
463 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
464 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
465 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
469 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
470 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
472 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
475 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
476 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
478 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
480 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
481 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
482 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
484 ** Changes in behavior
486 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
487 rather than its aliased target.
489 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
490 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
491 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
493 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
494 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
495 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
496 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
497 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
498 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
499 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
500 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
502 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
504 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
506 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
507 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
510 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
511 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
512 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
513 control like taskset for example.
515 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
517 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
518 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
519 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
520 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
521 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
522 includes %C when context information is available.
524 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
525 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
526 rather than a file system attribute.
528 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
529 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
530 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
531 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
533 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
534 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
535 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
537 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
538 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
539 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
542 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
546 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
547 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
549 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
551 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
552 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
554 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
555 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
556 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
557 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
559 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
560 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
561 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
565 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
566 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
568 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
569 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
570 duration after the initial signal was sent.
572 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
573 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
574 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
575 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
576 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
577 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
578 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
579 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
580 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
582 ** Changes in behavior
584 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
585 sequence when it would be a no-op.
587 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
588 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
591 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
595 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
596 of available processors, which may not have been the case
597 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
598 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
602 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
603 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
605 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
606 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
607 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
608 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
610 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
611 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
612 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
615 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
619 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
620 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
621 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
623 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
624 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
625 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
627 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
628 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
630 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
631 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
632 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
633 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
635 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
636 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
637 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
639 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
640 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
641 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
642 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
644 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
645 renamed-aside and then recreated.
646 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
648 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
649 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
650 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
651 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
653 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
654 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
655 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
657 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
658 processes will not intersperse their output.
659 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
662 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
666 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
667 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
669 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
670 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
672 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
673 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
674 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
675 the presence of the empty string argument.
676 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
678 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
679 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
680 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
681 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
683 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
684 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
686 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
687 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
688 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
690 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
691 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
692 and with a malicious user on the same system
693 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
694 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
697 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
701 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
702 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
703 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
705 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
706 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
707 offending directory and all "contents."
709 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
710 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
711 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
713 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
714 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
715 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
717 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
718 processes will not intersperse their output.
719 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
720 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
722 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
723 output the name of the file to stdout.
724 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
726 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
727 call fails with errno == EACCES.
728 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
730 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
731 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
734 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
735 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
736 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
738 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
739 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
740 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
741 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
742 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
743 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
745 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
746 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
747 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
748 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
750 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
751 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
753 ** Changes in behavior
755 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
756 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
757 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
758 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
759 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
761 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
762 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
763 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
764 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
766 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
768 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
769 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
770 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
771 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
772 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
776 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
780 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
781 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
783 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
784 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
786 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
787 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
788 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
790 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
791 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
794 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
798 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
799 when the source file doesn't have write access.
800 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
802 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
803 to accommodate leap seconds.
804 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
806 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
807 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
808 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
810 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
812 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
813 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
814 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
816 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
817 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
818 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
819 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
820 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
824 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
825 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
826 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
827 directory or a symlink to a directory.
829 ** Changes in behavior
831 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
832 environment variable is set.
834 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
835 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
836 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
840 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
841 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
842 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
843 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
845 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
846 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
847 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
848 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
852 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
853 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
854 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
856 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
857 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
858 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
859 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
860 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
861 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
864 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
865 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
868 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
872 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
873 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
874 and libraries tested at configure time.
875 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
877 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
878 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
880 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
881 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
883 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
884 printing a summary to stderr.
885 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
887 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
888 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
889 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
891 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
892 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
894 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
895 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
896 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
897 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
899 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
900 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
901 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
902 which is relatively unusual.
903 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
905 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
906 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
907 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
908 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
909 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
910 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
911 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
915 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
916 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
917 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
918 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
919 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
923 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
924 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
926 ** Changes in behavior
928 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
929 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
930 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
931 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
932 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
935 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
939 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
940 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
942 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
943 before data copying has started.
945 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
946 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
948 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
949 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
950 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
951 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
953 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
954 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
955 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
956 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
958 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
963 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
964 for its standard streams.
966 ** Changes in behavior
968 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
969 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
970 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
971 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
972 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
973 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
975 ** Deprecated options
977 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
978 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
982 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
984 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
985 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
988 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
990 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
991 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
993 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
994 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
997 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1001 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1002 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1003 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1004 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1006 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1007 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1008 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1009 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1010 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1015 make check: two tests have been corrected
1019 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1020 inherited from gnulib.
1023 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1027 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1028 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1029 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1030 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1032 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1033 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1035 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1037 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1038 systems without xattr support.
1040 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1041 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1042 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1044 ** Changes in behavior
1046 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1047 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1048 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1049 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1051 ** Improved robustness
1053 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1054 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1055 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1056 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1057 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1058 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1059 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1060 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1061 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1065 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1066 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1068 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1069 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1070 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1071 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1072 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1075 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1079 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1080 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1081 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1085 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1086 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1087 data was read, or on process exit.
1088 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1090 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1091 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1092 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1093 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1095 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1096 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1097 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1098 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1100 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1101 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1103 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1104 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1106 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1107 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1108 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1110 ** Changes in behavior
1112 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1113 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1114 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1116 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1117 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1119 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1120 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1121 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1124 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1128 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1130 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1131 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1132 install: Never copies xattrs
1134 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1135 from overwriting any existing destination file
1137 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1138 mode where this feature is available.
1140 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1141 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1142 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1143 do not modify the destination at all.
1145 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1147 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1151 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1152 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1154 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1156 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1157 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1159 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1160 processing the first file name
1162 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1163 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1164 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1165 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1167 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1168 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1170 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1171 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1174 ** Changes in behavior
1176 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1177 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1179 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1180 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1181 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1183 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1184 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1186 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1188 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1189 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1190 is still marked with a '+'.
1193 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1197 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1198 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1202 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1203 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1204 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1205 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1206 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1207 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1209 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1210 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1212 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1213 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1215 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1217 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1218 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1219 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1221 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1222 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1224 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1225 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1226 used to factor large numbers.
1228 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1231 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1233 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1235 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1236 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1238 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1239 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1240 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1241 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1243 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1244 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1245 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1247 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1248 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1252 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1254 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1255 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1257 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1258 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1260 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1262 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1263 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1267 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1268 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1269 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1271 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1273 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1274 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1275 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1277 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1278 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1279 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1281 ** Changes in behavior
1283 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1284 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1287 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1291 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1292 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1293 'futimens' system calls.
1297 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1299 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1300 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1301 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1303 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1304 with no USERNAME argument.
1306 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1307 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1308 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1310 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1311 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1312 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1313 number of fields for some inputs.
1315 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1316 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1318 ** Changes in behavior
1320 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1321 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1324 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1328 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1330 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1331 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1332 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1333 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1335 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1336 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1338 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1339 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1341 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1342 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1344 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1345 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1346 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1347 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1349 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1350 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1351 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1352 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1353 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1354 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1356 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1357 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1359 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1360 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1361 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1363 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1364 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1366 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1367 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1369 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1370 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1371 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1372 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1374 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1375 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1377 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1378 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1380 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1381 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1382 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1386 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1387 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1389 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1390 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1391 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1392 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1396 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1397 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1399 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1401 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1405 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1406 which have negative errno values.
1410 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1414 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1418 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1419 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1422 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1426 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1427 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1428 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1430 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1431 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1432 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1433 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1437 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1438 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1439 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1440 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1443 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1447 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1449 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1450 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1451 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1454 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1458 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1459 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1461 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1463 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1465 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1467 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1471 ** Changes in behavior
1473 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1474 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1476 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1477 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1479 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1480 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1481 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1485 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1486 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1487 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1488 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1489 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1490 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1491 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1492 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1493 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1494 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1495 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1497 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1498 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1499 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1502 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1505 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1506 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1507 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1509 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1510 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1511 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1514 ** New build options
1516 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1517 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1518 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1519 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1521 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1522 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1523 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1524 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1525 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1526 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1527 of "make check" fail.
1529 ** Remove deprecated options
1531 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1532 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1533 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1534 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1535 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1537 ** Improved robustness
1539 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1540 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1541 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1542 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1543 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1544 loss of the contents of a/f.
1546 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1547 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1551 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1552 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1553 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1555 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1556 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1557 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1558 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1560 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1561 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1562 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1563 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1564 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1565 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1566 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1567 destination is a symlink.
1569 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1571 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1572 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1574 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1575 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1577 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1579 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1580 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1582 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1583 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1585 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1588 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1589 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1591 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1592 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1594 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1595 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1596 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1597 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1599 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1600 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1601 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1603 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1604 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1605 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1607 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1608 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1609 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1610 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1612 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1613 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1614 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1616 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1617 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1619 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1620 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1622 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1624 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1625 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1626 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1628 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1629 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1631 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1632 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1634 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1635 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1637 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1638 [present in the original version]
1641 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1645 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1647 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1648 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1649 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1651 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1652 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1654 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1658 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1659 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1661 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1662 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1664 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1665 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1667 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1668 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1669 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1670 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1671 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1672 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1674 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1675 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1678 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1679 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1681 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1684 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1685 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1686 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1688 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1689 directory is unreadable.
1691 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1692 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1693 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1695 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1696 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1697 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1698 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1699 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1702 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1703 Before it would print nothing.
1705 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1707 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1708 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1709 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1710 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1711 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1712 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1713 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1714 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1716 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1720 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1721 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1722 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1724 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1725 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1726 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1727 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1730 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1734 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1735 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1736 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1737 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1738 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1739 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1740 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1742 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1743 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1744 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1745 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1746 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1747 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1748 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1749 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1751 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1752 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1753 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1756 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1760 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1761 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1763 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1764 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1765 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1767 ** Improved robustness
1769 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1770 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1771 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1774 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1778 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1779 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1780 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1781 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1782 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1784 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1788 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1791 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1795 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1796 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1797 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1798 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1800 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1801 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1803 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1804 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1805 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1808 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1810 ** Improved robustness
1812 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1813 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1815 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1816 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1817 or NFS-mounted partition.
1819 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1820 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1824 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1825 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1826 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1827 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1828 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1829 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1831 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1832 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1834 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1835 or neglect to report file removal.
1837 For the "groups" command:
1839 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1840 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1842 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1844 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1846 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1850 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1851 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1854 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1856 ** Changes in behavior
1858 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1859 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1860 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1861 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1863 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
1864 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1865 a final './' or '../' component.
1867 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1868 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1869 this only for pipes.
1871 ** Infrastructure changes
1873 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1874 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1875 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1876 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1880 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1881 name is "." or "..".
1883 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1884 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1885 dirent.d_type support.
1887 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1888 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1890 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1891 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1892 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1893 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1896 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1898 ** Changes in behavior
1900 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1904 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1905 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1909 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1910 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1911 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1913 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1914 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1916 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1917 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1919 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1921 ** Improved robustness
1923 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1924 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1925 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1927 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1928 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1931 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1932 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1934 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1935 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1937 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1938 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1940 ** Changes in behavior
1942 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1943 where the two are distinct.
1945 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1946 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1947 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1948 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1949 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1950 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1951 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1952 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1953 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1954 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1955 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1956 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1957 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
1958 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
1959 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
1960 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1961 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1963 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1964 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1965 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1967 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1968 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1969 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1970 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1973 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1974 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1978 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1979 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1980 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1981 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1983 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1984 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1985 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1987 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1988 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1989 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1990 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1991 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1994 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1995 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1997 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1998 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1999 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2000 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2002 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2003 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2004 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2006 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2007 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2008 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2009 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2011 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2012 and sticky) with the -m option.
2014 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2015 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2016 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2017 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2018 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2020 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2021 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2023 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2027 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2028 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2029 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2030 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2032 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2034 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2036 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2037 silently ignoring one of them.
2039 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2040 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2041 containing this change was 5.92.
2043 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2044 automatically newline terminated.
2046 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2047 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2048 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2049 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2052 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2053 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2054 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2057 ** Scheduled for removal
2059 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2060 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2062 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2063 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2064 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2065 command to unlink a directory.
2067 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2068 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2069 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2070 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2074 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2075 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2076 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2077 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2078 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2079 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2083 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2084 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2086 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2088 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2089 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2090 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2092 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2093 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2096 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2097 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2099 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2100 list directories before files.
2102 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2103 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2104 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2105 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2108 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2110 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2112 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2113 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2114 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2116 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2117 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2121 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2122 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2123 usually printing nothing.
2125 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2127 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2128 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2129 them with hard-linked directories.
2131 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2132 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2133 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2135 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2136 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2137 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2139 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2142 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2143 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2145 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2146 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2148 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2149 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2151 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2152 all command-line arguments.
2154 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2156 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2158 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2159 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2161 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2163 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2164 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2165 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2166 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2167 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2169 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2170 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2172 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2173 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2174 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2175 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2177 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2179 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2183 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2184 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2186 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2187 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2189 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2190 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2192 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2193 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2195 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2196 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2198 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2200 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2201 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2202 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2205 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2207 ** Build-related bug fixes
2209 installing .mo files would fail
2212 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2216 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2218 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2221 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2225 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2226 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2230 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2232 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2233 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2235 ** Deprecated options
2237 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2238 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2240 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2244 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2246 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2247 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2248 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2249 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2251 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2254 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2260 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2265 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2267 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2269 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2270 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2271 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2273 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2274 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2275 problematic usages. These include:
2277 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2278 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2279 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2280 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2281 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2282 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2283 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2284 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2285 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2287 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2288 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2290 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2291 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2292 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2293 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2295 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2296 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2297 between binary and text files.
2299 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2303 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2307 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2308 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2310 head tac tail tee tr
2311 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2313 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2314 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2316 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2317 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2318 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2320 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2322 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2324 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2325 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2326 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2330 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2332 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2333 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2335 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2336 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2337 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2341 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2342 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2346 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2347 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2348 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2352 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2353 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2357 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2359 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2361 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2365 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2366 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2367 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2369 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2370 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2371 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2372 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2373 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2375 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2379 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2380 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2381 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2383 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2385 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2386 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2387 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2388 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2390 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2392 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2393 rather than silently wrapping around.
2395 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2396 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2398 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2399 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2401 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2402 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2403 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2404 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2406 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2408 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2410 ** Improved robustness
2412 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2413 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2414 no matter how large the result.
2416 ** Improved portability
2418 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2419 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2421 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2423 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2424 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2425 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2427 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2428 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2432 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2433 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2435 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2437 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2438 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2439 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2440 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2442 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2443 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2445 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2446 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2447 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2449 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2451 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2452 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2454 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2455 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2457 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2459 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2460 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2462 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2463 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2465 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2466 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2467 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2469 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2471 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2473 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2477 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2479 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2480 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2481 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2483 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2484 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2486 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2487 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2488 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2490 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2491 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2493 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2494 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2495 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2496 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2498 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2499 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2501 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2502 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2503 the file system does not support it.
2505 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2507 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2508 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2510 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2512 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2513 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2515 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2516 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2517 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2518 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2520 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2521 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2524 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2525 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2526 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2527 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2529 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2530 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2531 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2532 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2534 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2535 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2537 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2539 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2540 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2541 reporting incorrect results.
2545 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2546 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2548 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2551 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2553 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2554 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2556 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2557 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2559 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2562 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2563 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2564 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2565 the file name does not look like a page range.
2567 printf has several changes:
2569 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2570 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2572 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2573 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2574 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2576 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2577 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2580 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2581 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2583 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2584 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2586 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2588 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2589 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2591 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2593 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2595 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2596 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2597 when first encountering the directory.
2601 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2602 output; POSIX requires this.
2604 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2605 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2607 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2609 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2610 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2612 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2613 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2615 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2616 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2617 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2618 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2619 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2620 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2621 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2623 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2624 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2625 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2627 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2628 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2630 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2632 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2634 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2635 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2636 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2637 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2639 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2643 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2644 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2645 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2646 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
2647 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
2649 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2650 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2651 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2653 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2654 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2656 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2657 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2659 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2660 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2661 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2662 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2663 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2665 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2666 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2668 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2669 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2671 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2673 nocreat do not create the output file
2674 excl fail if the output file already exists
2675 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2676 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2678 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2680 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2681 direct use direct I/O for data
2682 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2683 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2684 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2685 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2686 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2688 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2690 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2691 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
2694 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2695 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2696 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2697 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2698 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2699 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2701 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2702 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2704 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2707 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2709 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2711 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2712 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2714 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2715 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2716 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2718 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2719 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2720 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2722 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2724 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2725 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2727 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2728 for compatibility with bash.
2730 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2732 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2733 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2734 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2735 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2737 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2738 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2740 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2741 ls supports TABSIZE.
2742 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2743 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2744 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2746 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2749 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2751 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2752 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2753 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2754 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2755 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2756 an offset, not as a file name.
2758 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2759 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2761 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2762 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2764 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2765 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2767 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2768 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2769 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2771 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2772 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2774 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2775 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2779 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2781 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2783 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2787 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2788 or more arguments between partitions.
2790 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2791 holes in the destination.
2793 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2794 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2795 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2796 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2797 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2798 terminates immediately.
2800 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2802 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2804 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2805 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2806 not the empty string.
2808 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2809 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2813 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2814 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2815 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
2818 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2825 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2829 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2830 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
2832 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2833 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2835 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2836 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2837 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2840 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2844 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2845 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2847 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2848 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2850 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2851 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2852 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2854 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2856 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2859 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2861 ** Configuration option
2863 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2864 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2868 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2869 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2873 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2874 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2875 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2878 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2879 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2880 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2881 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2882 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2883 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2884 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2887 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2891 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2892 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2893 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2895 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2896 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2898 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2900 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2901 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2902 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2903 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2905 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2907 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2908 not just the ones that reference directories
2910 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2911 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2913 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2914 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2915 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2917 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2918 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2919 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2920 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2921 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2922 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2924 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2929 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2930 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2932 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2934 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2936 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2938 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2939 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2941 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2942 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2944 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2946 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2950 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2952 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2954 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2955 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2956 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2957 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2958 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2960 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2961 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2963 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2964 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2966 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2967 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2969 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
2970 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2971 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2975 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
2976 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2977 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
2978 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2979 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2980 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2981 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2982 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2983 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2984 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2985 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2986 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2987 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2988 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2990 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
2992 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2993 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2995 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2997 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2999 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3000 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3002 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3004 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3005 without a trailing newline.
3007 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3008 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3010 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3013 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3017 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3019 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3021 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3022 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3023 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3024 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3026 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3028 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3029 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3030 be printed without leading spaces.
3032 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3033 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3038 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3039 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3040 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3042 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3044 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3045 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3047 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3048 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3050 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3051 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3053 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3055 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3057 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3059 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3060 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3062 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3064 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3066 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3067 byte offsets are specified.
3070 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3073 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3076 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3077 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3078 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3079 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3080 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3081 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3082 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3083 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3084 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3085 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3086 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3087 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3088 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3089 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3090 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3091 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3092 directory where M has write access.
3093 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3094 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3095 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3098 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3099 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3100 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3101 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3102 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3103 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3104 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3105 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3106 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3107 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3108 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3109 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3110 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3111 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3112 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3113 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3114 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3115 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3116 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3117 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3118 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3119 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3120 appeared one additional time.
3122 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3123 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3124 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3125 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3128 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3129 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3130 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3131 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3132 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3133 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3134 if there were more than 338.
3136 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3137 - false --help now exits nonzero
3140 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3141 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3142 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3143 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3146 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3147 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3148 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3149 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3150 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3153 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3154 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3155 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3156 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3157 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3158 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3159 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3162 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3163 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3164 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3165 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3166 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3167 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3169 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3170 under certain unusual conditions
3171 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3172 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3175 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3176 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3177 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3178 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3179 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3180 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3181 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3182 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3183 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3184 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3185 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3186 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3187 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3188 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3189 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3190 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3193 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3194 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3197 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3198 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3199 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3200 involving hard-linked directories
3201 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3202 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3203 character-special and block files
3206 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3207 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3208 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3209 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3210 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3211 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3212 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3213 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3214 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3216 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3217 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3218 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3219 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3220 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3221 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3222 specified on the command line.
3223 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3224 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3225 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3226 the first file untouched.
3227 * readlink: new program
3228 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3229 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3230 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3231 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3232 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3233 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3236 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3237 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3238 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3239 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3240 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3241 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3242 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3243 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3244 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3245 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3246 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3247 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3249 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3250 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3251 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3253 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3254 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3255 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3256 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3257 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3258 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3259 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3260 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3263 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3264 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3267 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3268 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3269 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3270 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3271 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3272 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3273 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3276 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3277 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3279 ========================================================================
3280 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3281 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3284 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3286 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3287 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3288 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3289 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3290 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3291 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3292 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3293 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3294 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3295 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3296 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3297 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3299 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3300 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3301 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3302 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3304 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3307 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3309 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3310 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3311 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3312 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3313 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3314 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3315 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3318 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3319 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3320 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3321 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3322 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3323 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3324 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3325 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3326 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3327 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3328 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3329 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3330 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3331 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3332 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3333 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3335 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3336 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3338 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3339 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3340 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3341 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3342 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3343 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3345 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3346 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3347 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3348 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3349 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3350 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3351 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3353 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3354 the source files in the following example:
3355 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3356 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3357 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3358 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3359 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3360 links between source files with --preserve=links
3361 * cp accepts new options:
3362 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3363 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3364 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3365 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3366 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3367 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3368 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3369 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3370 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3372 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3373 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3374 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3375 even though it's older than dest.
3376 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3377 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3378 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3379 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3380 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3382 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3383 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3384 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3385 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3386 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3387 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3388 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3390 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3391 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3392 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3394 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3395 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3396 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3397 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3398 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3399 This is the default.
3401 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3402 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3403 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3404 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3405 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3407 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3410 ========================================================================
3411 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3412 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3415 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3416 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3418 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3419 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3420 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3421 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3422 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3424 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3425 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3426 that specifies a non-directory
3429 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3430 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3431 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3432 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3433 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3434 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3435 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3436 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3437 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3438 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3439 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3440 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3441 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3442 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3443 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3444 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3445 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3446 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3447 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3448 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3449 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3450 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3451 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3452 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3454 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3455 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3456 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3458 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3460 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3461 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3463 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3464 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3465 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3466 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3467 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3469 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3470 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3471 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3472 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3473 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3475 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3477 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3478 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3479 * still more portability fixes
3480 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3481 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3483 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3485 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3487 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3489 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3490 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3491 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3492 there is any time remaining
3493 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3495 ========================================================================
3496 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3497 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3499 This package began as the union of the following:
3500 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3502 ========================================================================
3504 Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3506 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3507 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3508 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3509 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3510 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3511 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.