1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
8 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
10 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
11 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
13 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
14 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
16 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
17 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
18 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
19 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
21 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
22 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
24 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
25 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
26 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
28 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
32 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
35 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
39 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
40 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
41 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
42 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
44 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
45 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
46 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
48 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
49 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
51 ** Changes in behavior
53 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
54 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
56 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
57 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
58 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
59 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
60 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
61 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
63 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
64 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
65 the same way as the others.
68 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
72 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
73 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
74 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
76 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
77 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
79 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
80 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
81 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
83 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
84 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
86 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
87 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
89 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
90 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
91 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
93 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
94 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
95 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
96 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
100 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
101 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
103 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
106 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
107 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
109 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
111 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
112 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
113 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
115 ** Changes in behavior
117 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
118 rather than its aliased target.
120 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
121 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
122 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
124 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
125 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
126 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
127 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
128 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
129 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
130 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
131 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
133 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
135 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
137 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
138 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
141 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
142 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
143 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
144 control like taskset for example.
146 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
148 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
149 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
150 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
151 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
152 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
153 includes %C when context information is available.
155 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
156 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
157 rather than a file system attribute.
159 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
160 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
161 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
162 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
164 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
165 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
166 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
168 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
169 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
170 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
173 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
177 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
178 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
180 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
182 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
183 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
185 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
186 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
187 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
188 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
190 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
191 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
192 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
196 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
197 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
199 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
200 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
201 duration after the initial signal was sent.
203 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
204 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
205 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
206 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
207 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
208 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
209 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
210 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
211 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
213 ** Changes in behavior
215 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
216 sequence when it would be a no-op.
218 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
219 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
222 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
226 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
227 of available processors, which may not have been the case
228 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
229 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
233 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
234 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
236 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
237 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
238 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
239 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
241 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
242 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
243 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
246 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
250 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
251 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
252 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
254 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
255 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
256 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
258 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
259 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
261 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
262 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
263 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
264 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
266 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
267 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
268 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
270 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
271 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
272 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
273 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
275 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
276 renamed-aside and then recreated.
277 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
279 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
280 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
281 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
282 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
284 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
285 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
286 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
288 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
289 processes will not intersperse their output.
290 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
293 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
297 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
298 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
300 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
301 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
303 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
304 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
305 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
306 the presence of the empty string argument.
307 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
309 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
310 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
311 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
312 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
314 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
315 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
317 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
318 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
319 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
321 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
322 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
323 and with a malicious user on the same system
324 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
325 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
328 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
332 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
333 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
334 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
336 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
337 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
338 offending directory and all "contents."
340 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
341 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
342 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
344 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
345 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
346 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
348 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
349 processes will not intersperse their output.
350 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
351 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
353 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
354 output the name of the file to stdout.
355 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
357 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
358 call fails with errno == EACCES.
359 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
361 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
362 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
365 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
366 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
367 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
369 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
370 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
371 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
372 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
373 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
374 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
376 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
377 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
378 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
379 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
381 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
382 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
384 ** Changes in behavior
386 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
387 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
388 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
389 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
390 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
392 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
393 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
394 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
395 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
397 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
399 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
400 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
401 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
402 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
403 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
407 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
411 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
412 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
414 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
415 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
417 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
418 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
419 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
421 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
422 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
425 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
429 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
430 when the source file doesn't have write access.
431 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
433 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
434 to accommodate leap seconds.
435 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
437 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
438 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
439 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
441 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
443 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
444 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
445 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
447 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
448 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
449 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
450 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
451 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
455 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
456 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
457 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
458 directory or a symlink to a directory.
460 ** Changes in behavior
462 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
463 environment variable is set.
465 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
466 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
467 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
471 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
472 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
473 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
474 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
476 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
477 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
478 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
479 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
483 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
484 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
485 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
487 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
488 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
489 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
490 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
491 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
492 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
495 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
496 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
499 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
503 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
504 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
505 and libraries tested at configure time.
506 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
508 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
509 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
511 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
512 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
514 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
515 printing a summary to stderr.
516 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
518 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
519 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
520 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
522 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
523 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
525 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
526 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
527 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
528 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
530 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
531 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
532 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
533 which is relatively unusual.
534 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
536 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
537 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
538 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
539 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
540 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
541 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
542 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
546 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
547 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
548 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
549 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
550 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
554 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
555 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
557 ** Changes in behavior
559 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
560 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
561 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
562 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
563 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
566 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
570 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
571 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
573 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
574 before data copying has started.
576 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
577 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
579 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
580 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
581 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
582 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
584 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
585 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
586 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
587 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
589 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
594 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
595 for its standard streams.
597 ** Changes in behavior
599 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
600 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
601 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
602 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
603 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
604 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
606 ** Deprecated options
608 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
609 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
613 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
615 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
616 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
619 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
621 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
622 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
624 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
625 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
628 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
632 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
633 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
634 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
635 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
637 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
638 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
639 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
640 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
641 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
646 make check: two tests have been corrected
650 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
651 inherited from gnulib.
654 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
658 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
659 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
660 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
661 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
663 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
664 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
666 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
668 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
669 systems without xattr support.
671 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
672 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
673 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
675 ** Changes in behavior
677 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
678 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
679 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
680 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
682 ** Improved robustness
684 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
685 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
686 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
687 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
688 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
689 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
690 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
691 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
692 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
696 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
697 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
699 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
700 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
701 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
702 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
703 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
706 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
710 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
711 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
712 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
716 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
717 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
718 data was read, or on process exit.
719 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
721 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
722 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
723 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
724 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
726 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
727 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
728 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
729 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
731 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
732 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
734 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
735 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
737 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
738 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
739 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
741 ** Changes in behavior
743 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
744 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
745 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
747 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
748 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
750 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
751 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
752 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
755 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
759 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
761 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
762 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
763 install: Never copies xattrs
765 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
766 from overwriting any existing destination file
768 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
769 mode where this feature is available.
771 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
772 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
773 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
774 do not modify the destination at all.
776 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
778 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
782 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
783 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
785 cp uses much less memory in some situations
787 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
788 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
790 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
791 processing the first file name
793 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
794 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
795 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
796 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
798 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
799 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
801 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
802 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
805 ** Changes in behavior
807 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
808 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
810 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
811 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
812 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
814 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
815 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
817 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
819 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
820 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
821 is still marked with a '+'.
824 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
828 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
829 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
833 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
834 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
835 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
836 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
837 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
838 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
840 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
841 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
843 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
844 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
846 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
848 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
849 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
850 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
852 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
853 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
855 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
856 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
857 used to factor large numbers.
859 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
862 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
864 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
866 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
867 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
869 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
870 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
871 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
872 maximum command-line (argv) length.
874 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
875 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
876 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
878 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
879 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
883 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
885 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
886 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
888 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
889 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
891 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
893 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
894 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
898 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
899 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
900 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
902 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
904 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
905 no matter how many files are in a given directory
907 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
908 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
909 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
911 ** Changes in behavior
913 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
914 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
917 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
921 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
923 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
924 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
925 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
927 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
928 with no USERNAME argument.
930 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
931 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
932 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
934 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
935 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
936 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
937 number of fields for some inputs.
939 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
940 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
942 ** Changes in behavior
944 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
945 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
948 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
952 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
954 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
955 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
956 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
957 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
959 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
960 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
962 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
963 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
965 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
966 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
968 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
969 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
970 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
971 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
973 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
974 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
975 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
976 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
977 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
978 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
980 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
981 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
983 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
984 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
985 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
987 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
988 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
990 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
991 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
993 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
994 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
995 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
996 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
998 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
999 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1001 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1002 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1004 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1005 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1006 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1010 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1011 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1013 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1014 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1015 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1016 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1020 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1021 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1023 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1025 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1029 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1030 which have negative errno values.
1034 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1038 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1042 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1043 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1046 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1050 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1051 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1052 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1054 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1055 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1056 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1057 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1061 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1062 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1063 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1064 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1067 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1071 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1073 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1074 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1075 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1078 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1082 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1083 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1085 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1087 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1089 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1091 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1095 ** Changes in behavior
1097 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1098 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1100 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1101 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1103 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1104 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1105 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1109 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1110 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1111 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1112 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1113 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1114 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1115 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1116 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1117 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1118 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1119 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1121 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1122 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1123 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1126 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1129 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1130 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1131 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1133 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1134 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1135 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1138 ** New build options
1140 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1141 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1142 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1143 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1145 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1146 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1147 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1148 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1149 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1150 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1151 of "make check" fail.
1153 ** Remove deprecated options
1155 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1156 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1157 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1158 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1159 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1161 ** Improved robustness
1163 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1164 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1165 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1166 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1167 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1168 loss of the contents of a/f.
1170 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1171 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1175 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1176 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1177 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1179 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1180 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1181 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1182 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1184 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1185 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1186 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1187 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1188 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1189 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1190 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1191 destination is a symlink.
1193 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1195 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1196 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1198 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1199 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1201 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1203 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1204 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1206 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1207 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1209 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1212 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1213 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1215 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1216 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1218 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1219 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1220 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1221 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1223 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1224 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1225 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1227 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1228 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1229 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1231 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1232 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1233 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1234 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1236 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1237 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1238 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1240 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1241 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1243 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1244 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1246 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1248 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1249 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1250 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1252 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1253 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1255 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1256 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1258 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1259 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1261 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1262 [present in the original version]
1265 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1269 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1271 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1272 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1273 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1275 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1276 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1278 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1282 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1283 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1285 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1286 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1288 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1289 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1291 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1292 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1293 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1294 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1295 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1296 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1298 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1299 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1302 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1303 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1305 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1308 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1309 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1310 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1312 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1313 directory is unreadable.
1315 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1316 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1317 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1319 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1320 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1321 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1322 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1323 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1326 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1327 Before it would print nothing.
1329 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1331 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1332 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1333 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1334 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1335 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1336 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1337 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1338 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1340 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1344 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1345 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1346 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1348 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1349 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1350 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1351 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1354 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1358 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1359 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1360 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1361 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1362 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1363 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1364 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1366 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1367 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1368 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1369 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1370 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1371 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1372 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1373 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1375 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1376 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1377 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1380 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1384 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1385 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1387 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1388 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1389 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1391 ** Improved robustness
1393 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1394 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1395 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1398 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1402 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1403 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1404 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1405 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1406 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1408 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1412 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1415 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1419 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1420 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1421 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1422 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1424 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1425 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1427 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1428 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1429 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1432 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1434 ** Improved robustness
1436 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1437 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1439 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1440 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1441 or NFS-mounted partition.
1443 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1444 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1448 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1449 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1450 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1451 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1452 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1453 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1455 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1456 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1458 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1459 or neglect to report file removal.
1461 For the "groups" command:
1463 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1464 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1466 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1468 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1470 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1474 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1475 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1478 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1480 ** Changes in behavior
1482 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1483 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1484 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1485 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1487 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1488 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1489 a final `./' or `../' component.
1491 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1492 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1493 this only for pipes.
1495 ** Infrastructure changes
1497 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1498 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1499 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1500 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1504 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1505 name is "." or "..".
1507 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1508 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1509 dirent.d_type support.
1511 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1512 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1514 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1515 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1516 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1517 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1520 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1522 ** Changes in behavior
1524 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1528 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1529 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1533 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1534 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1535 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1537 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1538 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1540 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1541 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1543 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1545 ** Improved robustness
1547 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1548 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1549 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1551 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1552 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1555 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1556 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1558 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1559 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1561 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1562 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1564 ** Changes in behavior
1566 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1567 where the two are distinct.
1569 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1570 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1571 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1572 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1573 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1574 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1575 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1576 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1577 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1578 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1579 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1580 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1581 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1582 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1583 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1584 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1585 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1587 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1588 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1589 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1591 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1592 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1593 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1594 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1597 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1598 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1602 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1603 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1604 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1605 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1607 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1608 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1609 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1611 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1612 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1613 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1614 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1615 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1618 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1619 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1621 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1622 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1623 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1624 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1626 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1627 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1628 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1630 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1631 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1632 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1633 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1635 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1636 and sticky) with the -m option.
1638 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1639 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1640 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1641 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1642 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1644 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1645 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1647 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1651 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1652 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1653 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1654 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1656 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1658 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1660 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1661 silently ignoring one of them.
1663 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1664 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1665 containing this change was 5.92.
1667 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1668 automatically newline terminated.
1670 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1671 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1672 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1673 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1676 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1677 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1678 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1681 ** Scheduled for removal
1683 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1684 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1686 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1687 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1688 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1689 command to unlink a directory.
1691 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1692 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1693 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1694 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1698 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1699 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1700 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1701 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1702 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1703 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1707 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1708 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1710 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1712 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1713 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1714 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1716 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1717 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1720 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1721 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1723 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1724 list directories before files.
1726 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1727 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1728 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1729 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1732 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1734 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1736 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1737 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1738 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1740 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1741 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1745 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1746 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1747 usually printing nothing.
1749 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1751 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1752 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1753 them with hard-linked directories.
1755 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1756 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1757 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1759 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1760 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1761 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1763 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1766 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1767 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1769 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1770 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1772 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1773 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1775 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1776 all command-line arguments.
1778 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1780 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1782 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1783 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1785 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1787 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1788 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1789 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1790 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1791 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1793 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1794 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1796 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1797 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1798 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1799 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1801 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1803 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1807 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1808 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1810 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1811 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1813 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1814 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1816 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1817 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1819 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1820 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1822 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1824 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1825 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1826 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1829 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1831 ** Build-related bug fixes
1833 installing .mo files would fail
1836 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1840 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1842 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1845 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1849 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1850 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1854 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1856 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1857 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1859 ** Deprecated options
1861 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1862 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1864 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1868 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1870 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1871 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1872 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1873 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1875 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1878 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1884 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1889 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1891 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1893 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1894 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1895 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1897 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1898 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1899 problematic usages. These include:
1901 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1902 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1903 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1904 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1905 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1906 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1907 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1908 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1909 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1911 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1912 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1914 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1915 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1916 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1917 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1919 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1920 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1921 between binary and text files.
1923 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1927 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1931 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1932 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1934 head tac tail tee tr
1935 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1937 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1938 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1940 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1941 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1942 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1944 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1946 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1948 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1949 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1950 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1954 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1956 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1957 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1959 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1960 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1961 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1965 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1966 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1970 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1971 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1972 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1976 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1977 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1981 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1983 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1985 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1989 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1990 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1991 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1993 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1994 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1995 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1996 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1997 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1999 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2003 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2004 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2005 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2007 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2009 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2010 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2011 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2012 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2014 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2016 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2017 rather than silently wrapping around.
2019 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2020 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2022 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2023 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2025 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2026 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2027 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2028 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2030 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2032 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2034 ** Improved robustness
2036 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2037 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2038 no matter how large the result.
2040 ** Improved portability
2042 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2043 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2045 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2047 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2048 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2049 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2051 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2052 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2056 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2057 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2059 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2061 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2062 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2063 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2064 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2066 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2067 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2069 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2070 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2071 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2073 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2075 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2076 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2078 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2079 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2081 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2083 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2084 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2086 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2087 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2089 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2090 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2091 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2093 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2095 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2097 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2101 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2103 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2104 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2105 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2107 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2108 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2110 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2111 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2112 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2114 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2115 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2117 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2118 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2119 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2120 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2122 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2123 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2125 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2126 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2127 the file system does not support it.
2129 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2131 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2132 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2134 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2136 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2137 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2139 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2140 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2141 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2142 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2144 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2145 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2148 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2149 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2150 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2151 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2153 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2154 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2155 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2156 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2158 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2159 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2161 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2163 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2164 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2165 reporting incorrect results.
2169 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2170 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2172 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2175 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2177 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2178 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2180 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2181 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2183 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2186 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2187 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2188 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2189 the file name does not look like a page range.
2191 printf has several changes:
2193 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2194 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2196 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2197 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2198 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2200 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2201 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2204 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2205 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2207 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2208 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2210 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2212 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2213 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2215 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2217 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2219 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2220 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2221 when first encountering the directory.
2225 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2226 output; POSIX requires this.
2228 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2229 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2231 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2233 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2234 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2236 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2237 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2239 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2240 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2241 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2242 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2243 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2244 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2245 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2247 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2248 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2249 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2251 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2252 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2254 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2256 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2258 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2259 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2260 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2261 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2263 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2267 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2268 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2269 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2270 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2271 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2273 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2274 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2275 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2277 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2278 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2280 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2281 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2283 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2284 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2285 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2286 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2287 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2289 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2290 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2292 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2293 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2295 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2297 nocreat do not create the output file
2298 excl fail if the output file already exists
2299 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2300 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2302 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2304 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2305 direct use direct I/O for data
2306 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2307 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2308 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2309 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2310 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2312 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2314 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2315 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2318 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2319 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2320 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2321 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2322 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2323 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2325 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2326 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2328 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2331 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2333 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2335 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2336 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2338 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2339 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2340 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2342 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2343 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2344 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2346 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2348 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2349 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2351 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2352 for compatibility with bash.
2354 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2356 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2357 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2358 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2359 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2361 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2362 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2364 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2365 ls supports TABSIZE.
2366 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2367 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2368 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2370 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2373 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2375 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2376 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2377 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2378 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2379 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2380 an offset, not as a file name.
2382 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2383 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2385 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2386 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2388 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2389 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2391 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2392 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2393 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2395 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2396 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2398 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2399 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2403 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2405 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2407 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2411 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2412 or more arguments between partitions.
2414 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2415 holes in the destination.
2417 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2418 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2419 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2420 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2421 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2422 terminates immediately.
2424 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2426 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2428 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2429 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2430 not the empty string.
2432 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2433 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2437 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2438 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2439 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2442 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2449 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2453 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2454 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2456 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2457 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2459 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2460 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2461 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2464 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2468 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2469 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2471 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2472 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2474 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2475 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2476 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2478 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2480 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2483 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2485 ** Configuration option
2487 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2488 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2492 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2493 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2497 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2498 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2499 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2502 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2503 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2504 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2505 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2506 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2507 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2508 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2511 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2515 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2516 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2517 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2519 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2520 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2522 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2524 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2525 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2526 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2527 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2529 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2531 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2532 not just the ones that reference directories
2534 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2535 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2537 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2538 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2539 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2541 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2542 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2543 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2544 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2545 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2546 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2548 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2553 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2554 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2556 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2558 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2560 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2562 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2563 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2565 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2566 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2568 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2570 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2574 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2576 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2578 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2579 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2580 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2581 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2582 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2584 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2585 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2587 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2588 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2590 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2591 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2593 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2594 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2595 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2599 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2600 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2601 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2602 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2603 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2604 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2605 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2606 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2607 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2608 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2609 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2610 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2611 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2612 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2614 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2616 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2617 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2619 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2621 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2623 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2624 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2626 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2628 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2629 without a trailing newline.
2631 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2632 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2634 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2637 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2641 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2643 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2645 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2646 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2647 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2648 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2650 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2652 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2653 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2654 be printed without leading spaces.
2656 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2657 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2662 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2663 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2664 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2666 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2668 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2669 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2671 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2672 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2674 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2675 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2677 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2679 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2681 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2683 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2684 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2686 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2688 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2690 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2691 byte offsets are specified.
2694 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2697 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2700 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2701 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2702 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2703 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2704 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2705 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2706 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2707 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2708 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2709 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2710 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2711 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2712 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2713 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2714 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2715 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2716 directory where M has write access.
2717 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2718 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2719 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2722 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2723 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2724 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2725 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2726 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2727 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2728 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2729 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2730 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2731 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2732 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2733 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2734 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2735 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2736 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2737 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2738 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2739 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2740 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2741 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2742 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2743 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2744 appeared one additional time.
2746 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2747 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2748 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2749 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2752 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2753 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2754 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2755 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2756 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2757 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2758 if there were more than 338.
2760 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2761 - false --help now exits nonzero
2764 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2765 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2766 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2767 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2770 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2771 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2772 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2773 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2774 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2777 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2778 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2779 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2780 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2781 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2782 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2783 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2786 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2787 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2788 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2789 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2790 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2791 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2793 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2794 under certain unusual conditions
2795 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2796 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2799 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2800 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2801 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2802 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2803 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2804 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2805 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2806 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2807 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2808 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2809 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2810 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2811 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2812 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2813 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2814 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2817 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2818 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2821 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2822 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2823 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2824 involving hard-linked directories
2825 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2826 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2827 character-special and block files
2830 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2831 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2832 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2833 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2834 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2835 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2836 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2837 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2838 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2840 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2841 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2842 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2843 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2844 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2845 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2846 specified on the command line.
2847 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2848 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2849 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2850 the first file untouched.
2851 * readlink: new program
2852 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2853 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2854 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2855 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2856 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2857 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2860 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2861 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2862 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2863 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2864 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2865 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2866 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2867 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2868 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2869 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2870 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2871 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2873 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2874 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2875 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2877 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2878 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2879 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2880 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2881 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2882 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2883 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2884 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2887 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2888 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2891 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2892 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2893 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2894 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2895 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2896 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2897 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2900 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2901 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2903 ========================================================================
2904 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2905 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2908 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2910 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2911 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2912 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2913 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2914 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2915 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2916 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2917 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2918 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2919 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2920 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2921 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2923 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2924 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2925 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2926 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2928 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2931 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2933 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2934 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2935 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2936 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2937 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2938 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2939 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2942 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2943 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2944 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2945 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2946 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2947 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2948 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2949 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2950 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2951 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2952 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2953 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2954 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2955 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2956 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2957 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2959 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2960 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2962 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2963 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2964 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2965 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2966 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2967 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2969 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2970 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2971 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2972 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2973 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2974 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2975 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2977 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2978 the source files in the following example:
2979 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2980 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2981 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2982 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2983 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2984 links between source files with --preserve=links
2985 * cp accepts new options:
2986 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2987 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2988 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2989 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2990 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2991 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2992 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2993 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2994 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2996 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2997 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2998 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2999 even though it's older than dest.
3000 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3001 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3002 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3003 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3004 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3006 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3007 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3008 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3009 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3010 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3011 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3012 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3014 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3015 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3016 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3018 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3019 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3020 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3021 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3022 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3023 This is the default.
3025 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3026 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3027 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3028 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3029 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3031 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3034 ========================================================================
3035 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3036 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3039 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3040 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3042 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3043 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3044 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3045 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3046 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3048 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3049 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3050 that specifies a non-directory
3053 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3054 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3055 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3056 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3057 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3058 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3059 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3060 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3061 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3062 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3063 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3064 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3065 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3066 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3067 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3068 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3069 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3070 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3071 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3072 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3073 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3074 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3075 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3076 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3078 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3079 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3080 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3082 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3084 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3085 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3087 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3088 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3089 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3090 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3091 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3093 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3094 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3095 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3096 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3097 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3099 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3101 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3102 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3103 * still more portability fixes
3104 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3105 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3107 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3109 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3111 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3113 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3114 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3115 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3116 there is any time remaining
3117 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3119 ========================================================================
3120 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3121 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3123 This package began as the union of the following:
3124 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3126 ========================================================================
3128 Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3130 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3131 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3132 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3133 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3134 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3135 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.