1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
6 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
10 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
11 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
13 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
14 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
16 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
17 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
19 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
20 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
21 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
22 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
24 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
25 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
27 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
28 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
29 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
31 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
33 ** Changes in behavior
35 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
36 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
37 to the number of available processors.
41 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
44 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
48 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
49 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
50 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
51 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
53 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
54 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
55 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
57 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
58 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
60 ** Changes in behavior
62 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
63 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
65 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
66 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
67 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
68 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
69 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
70 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
72 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
73 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
74 the same way as the others.
77 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
81 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
82 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
83 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
85 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
86 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
88 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
89 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
90 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
92 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
93 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
95 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
96 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
98 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
99 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
100 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
102 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
103 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
104 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
105 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
109 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
110 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
112 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
115 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
116 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
118 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
120 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
121 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
122 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
124 ** Changes in behavior
126 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
127 rather than its aliased target.
129 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
130 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
131 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
133 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
134 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
135 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
136 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
137 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
138 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
139 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
140 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
142 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
144 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
146 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
147 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
150 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
151 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
152 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
153 control like taskset for example.
155 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
157 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
158 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
159 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
160 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
161 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
162 includes %C when context information is available.
164 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
165 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
166 rather than a file system attribute.
168 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
169 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
170 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
171 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
173 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
174 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
175 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
177 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
178 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
179 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
182 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
186 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
187 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
189 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
191 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
192 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
194 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
195 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
196 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
197 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
199 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
200 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
201 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
205 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
206 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
208 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
209 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
210 duration after the initial signal was sent.
212 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
213 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
214 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
215 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
216 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
217 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
218 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
219 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
220 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
222 ** Changes in behavior
224 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
225 sequence when it would be a no-op.
227 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
228 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
231 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
235 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
236 of available processors, which may not have been the case
237 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
238 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
242 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
243 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
245 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
246 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
247 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
248 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
250 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
251 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
252 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
255 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
259 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
260 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
261 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
263 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
264 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
265 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
267 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
268 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
270 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
271 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
272 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
273 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
275 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
276 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
277 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
279 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
280 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
281 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
282 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
284 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
285 renamed-aside and then recreated.
286 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
288 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
289 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
290 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
291 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
293 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
294 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
295 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
297 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
298 processes will not intersperse their output.
299 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
302 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
306 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
307 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
309 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
310 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
312 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
313 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
314 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
315 the presence of the empty string argument.
316 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
318 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
319 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
320 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
321 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
323 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
324 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
326 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
327 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
328 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
330 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
331 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
332 and with a malicious user on the same system
333 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
334 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
337 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
341 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
342 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
343 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
345 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
346 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
347 offending directory and all "contents."
349 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
350 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
351 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
353 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
354 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
355 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
357 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
358 processes will not intersperse their output.
359 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
360 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
362 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
363 output the name of the file to stdout.
364 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
366 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
367 call fails with errno == EACCES.
368 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
370 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
371 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
374 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
375 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
376 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
378 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
379 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
380 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
381 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
382 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
383 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
385 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
386 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
387 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
388 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
390 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
391 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
393 ** Changes in behavior
395 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
396 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
397 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
398 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
399 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
401 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
402 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
403 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
404 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
406 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
408 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
409 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
410 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
411 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
412 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
416 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
420 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
421 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
423 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
424 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
426 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
427 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
428 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
430 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
431 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
434 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
438 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
439 when the source file doesn't have write access.
440 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
442 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
443 to accommodate leap seconds.
444 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
446 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
447 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
448 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
450 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
452 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
453 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
454 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
456 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
457 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
458 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
459 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
460 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
464 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
465 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
466 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
467 directory or a symlink to a directory.
469 ** Changes in behavior
471 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
472 environment variable is set.
474 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
475 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
476 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
480 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
481 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
482 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
483 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
485 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
486 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
487 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
488 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
492 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
493 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
494 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
496 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
497 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
498 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
499 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
500 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
501 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
504 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
505 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
508 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
512 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
513 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
514 and libraries tested at configure time.
515 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
517 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
518 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
520 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
521 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
523 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
524 printing a summary to stderr.
525 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
527 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
528 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
529 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
531 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
532 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
534 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
535 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
536 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
537 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
539 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
540 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
541 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
542 which is relatively unusual.
543 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
545 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
546 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
547 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
548 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
549 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
550 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
551 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
555 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
556 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
557 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
558 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
559 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
563 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
564 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
566 ** Changes in behavior
568 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
569 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
570 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
571 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
572 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
575 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
579 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
580 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
582 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
583 before data copying has started.
585 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
586 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
588 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
589 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
590 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
591 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
593 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
594 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
595 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
596 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
598 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
603 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
604 for its standard streams.
606 ** Changes in behavior
608 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
609 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
610 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
611 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
612 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
613 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
615 ** Deprecated options
617 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
618 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
622 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
624 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
625 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
628 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
630 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
631 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
633 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
634 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
637 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
641 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
642 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
643 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
644 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
646 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
647 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
648 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
649 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
650 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
655 make check: two tests have been corrected
659 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
660 inherited from gnulib.
663 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
667 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
668 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
669 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
670 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
672 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
673 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
675 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
677 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
678 systems without xattr support.
680 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
681 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
682 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
684 ** Changes in behavior
686 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
687 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
688 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
689 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
691 ** Improved robustness
693 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
694 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
695 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
696 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
697 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
698 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
699 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
700 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
701 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
705 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
706 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
708 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
709 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
710 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
711 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
712 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
715 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
719 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
720 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
721 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
725 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
726 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
727 data was read, or on process exit.
728 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
730 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
731 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
732 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
733 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
735 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
736 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
737 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
738 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
740 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
741 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
743 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
744 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
746 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
747 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
748 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
750 ** Changes in behavior
752 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
753 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
754 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
756 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
757 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
759 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
760 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
761 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
764 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
768 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
770 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
771 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
772 install: Never copies xattrs
774 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
775 from overwriting any existing destination file
777 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
778 mode where this feature is available.
780 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
781 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
782 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
783 do not modify the destination at all.
785 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
787 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
791 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
792 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
794 cp uses much less memory in some situations
796 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
797 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
799 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
800 processing the first file name
802 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
803 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
804 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
805 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
807 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
808 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
810 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
811 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
814 ** Changes in behavior
816 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
817 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
819 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
820 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
821 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
823 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
824 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
826 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
828 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
829 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
830 is still marked with a '+'.
833 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
837 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
838 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
842 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
843 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
844 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
845 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
846 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
847 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
849 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
850 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
852 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
853 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
855 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
857 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
858 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
859 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
861 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
862 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
864 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
865 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
866 used to factor large numbers.
868 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
871 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
873 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
875 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
876 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
878 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
879 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
880 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
881 maximum command-line (argv) length.
883 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
884 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
885 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
887 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
888 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
892 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
894 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
895 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
897 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
898 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
900 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
902 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
903 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
907 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
908 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
909 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
911 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
913 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
914 no matter how many files are in a given directory
916 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
917 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
918 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
920 ** Changes in behavior
922 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
923 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
926 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
930 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
932 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
933 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
934 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
936 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
937 with no USERNAME argument.
939 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
940 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
941 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
943 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
944 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
945 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
946 number of fields for some inputs.
948 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
949 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
951 ** Changes in behavior
953 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
954 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
957 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
961 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
963 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
964 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
965 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
966 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
968 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
969 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
971 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
972 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
974 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
975 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
977 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
978 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
979 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
980 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
982 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
983 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
984 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
985 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
986 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
987 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
989 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
990 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
992 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
993 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
994 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
996 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
997 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
999 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1000 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1002 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1003 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1004 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1005 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1007 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1008 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1010 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1011 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1013 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1014 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1015 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1019 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1020 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1022 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1023 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1024 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1025 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1029 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1030 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1032 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1034 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1038 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1039 which have negative errno values.
1043 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1047 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1051 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1052 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1055 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1059 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1060 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1061 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1063 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1064 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1065 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1066 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1070 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1071 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1072 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1073 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1076 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1080 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1082 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1083 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1084 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1087 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1091 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1092 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1094 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1096 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1098 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1100 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1104 ** Changes in behavior
1106 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1107 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1109 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1110 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1112 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1113 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1114 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1118 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1119 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1120 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1121 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1122 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1123 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1124 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1125 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1126 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1127 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1128 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1130 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1131 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1132 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1135 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1138 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1139 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1140 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1142 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1143 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1144 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1147 ** New build options
1149 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1150 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1151 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1152 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1154 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1155 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1156 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1157 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1158 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1159 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1160 of "make check" fail.
1162 ** Remove deprecated options
1164 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1165 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1166 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1167 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1168 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1170 ** Improved robustness
1172 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1173 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1174 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1175 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1176 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1177 loss of the contents of a/f.
1179 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1180 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1184 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1185 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1186 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1188 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1189 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1190 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1191 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1193 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1194 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1195 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1196 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1197 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1198 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1199 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1200 destination is a symlink.
1202 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1204 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1205 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1207 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1208 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1210 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1212 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1213 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1215 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1216 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1218 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1221 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1222 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1224 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1225 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1227 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1228 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1229 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1230 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1232 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1233 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1234 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1236 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1237 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1238 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1240 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1241 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1242 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1243 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1245 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1246 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1247 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1249 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1250 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1252 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1253 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1255 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1257 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1258 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1259 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1261 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1262 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1264 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1265 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1267 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1268 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1270 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1271 [present in the original version]
1274 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1278 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1280 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1281 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1282 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1284 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1285 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1287 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1291 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1292 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1294 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1295 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1297 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1298 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1300 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1301 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1302 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1303 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1304 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1305 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1307 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1308 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1311 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1312 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1314 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1317 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1318 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1319 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1321 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1322 directory is unreadable.
1324 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1325 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1326 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1328 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1329 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1330 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1331 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1332 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1335 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1336 Before it would print nothing.
1338 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1340 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1341 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1342 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1343 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1344 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1345 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1346 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1347 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1349 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1353 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1354 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1355 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1357 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1358 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1359 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1360 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1363 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1367 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1368 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1369 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1370 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1371 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1372 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1373 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1375 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1376 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1377 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1378 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1379 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1380 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1381 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1382 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1384 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1385 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1386 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1389 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1393 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1394 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1396 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1397 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1398 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1400 ** Improved robustness
1402 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1403 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1404 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1407 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1411 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1412 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1413 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1414 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1415 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1417 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1421 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1424 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1428 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1429 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1430 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1431 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1433 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1434 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1436 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1437 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1438 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1441 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1443 ** Improved robustness
1445 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1446 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1448 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1449 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1450 or NFS-mounted partition.
1452 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1453 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1457 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1458 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1459 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1460 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1461 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1462 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1464 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1465 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1467 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1468 or neglect to report file removal.
1470 For the "groups" command:
1472 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1473 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1475 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1477 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1479 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1483 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1484 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1487 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1489 ** Changes in behavior
1491 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1492 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1493 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1494 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1496 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1497 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1498 a final `./' or `../' component.
1500 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1501 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1502 this only for pipes.
1504 ** Infrastructure changes
1506 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1507 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1508 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1509 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1513 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1514 name is "." or "..".
1516 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1517 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1518 dirent.d_type support.
1520 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1521 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1523 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1524 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1525 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1526 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1529 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1531 ** Changes in behavior
1533 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1537 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1538 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1542 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1543 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1544 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1546 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1547 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1549 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1550 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1552 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1554 ** Improved robustness
1556 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1557 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1558 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1560 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1561 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1564 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1565 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1567 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1568 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1570 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1571 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1573 ** Changes in behavior
1575 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1576 where the two are distinct.
1578 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1579 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1580 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1581 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1582 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1583 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1584 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1585 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1586 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1587 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1588 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1589 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1590 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1591 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1592 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1593 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1594 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1596 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1597 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1598 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1600 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1601 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1602 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1603 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1606 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1607 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1611 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1612 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1613 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1614 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1616 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1617 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1618 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1620 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1621 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1622 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1623 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1624 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1627 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1628 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1630 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1631 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1632 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1633 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1635 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1636 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1637 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1639 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1640 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1641 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1642 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1644 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1645 and sticky) with the -m option.
1647 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1648 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1649 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1650 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1651 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1653 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1654 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1656 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1660 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1661 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1662 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1663 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1665 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1667 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1669 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1670 silently ignoring one of them.
1672 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1673 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1674 containing this change was 5.92.
1676 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1677 automatically newline terminated.
1679 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1680 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1681 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1682 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1685 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1686 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1687 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1690 ** Scheduled for removal
1692 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1693 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1695 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1696 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1697 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1698 command to unlink a directory.
1700 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1701 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1702 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1703 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1707 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1708 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1709 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1710 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1711 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1712 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1716 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1717 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1719 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1721 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1722 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1723 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1725 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1726 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1729 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1730 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1732 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1733 list directories before files.
1735 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1736 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1737 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1738 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1741 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1743 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1745 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1746 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1747 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1749 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1750 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1754 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1755 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1756 usually printing nothing.
1758 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1760 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1761 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1762 them with hard-linked directories.
1764 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1765 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1766 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1768 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1769 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1770 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1772 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1775 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1776 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1778 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1779 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1781 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1782 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1784 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1785 all command-line arguments.
1787 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1789 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1791 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1792 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1794 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1796 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1797 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1798 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1799 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1800 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1802 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1803 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1805 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1806 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1807 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1808 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1810 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1812 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1816 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1817 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1819 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1820 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1822 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1823 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1825 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1826 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1828 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1829 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1831 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1833 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1834 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1835 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1838 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1840 ** Build-related bug fixes
1842 installing .mo files would fail
1845 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1849 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1851 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1854 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1858 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1859 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1863 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1865 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1866 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1868 ** Deprecated options
1870 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1871 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1873 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1877 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1879 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1880 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1881 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1882 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1884 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1887 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1893 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1898 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1900 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1902 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1903 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1904 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1906 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1907 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1908 problematic usages. These include:
1910 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1911 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1912 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1913 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1914 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1915 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1916 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1917 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1918 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1920 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1921 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1923 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1924 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1925 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1926 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1928 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1929 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1930 between binary and text files.
1932 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1936 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1940 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1941 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1943 head tac tail tee tr
1944 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1946 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1947 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1949 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1950 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1951 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1953 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1955 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1957 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1958 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1959 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1963 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1965 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1966 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1968 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1969 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1970 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1974 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1975 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1979 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1980 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1981 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1985 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1986 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1990 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1992 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1994 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1998 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1999 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2000 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2002 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2003 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2004 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2005 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2006 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2008 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2012 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2013 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2014 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2016 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2018 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2019 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2020 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2021 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2023 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2025 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2026 rather than silently wrapping around.
2028 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2029 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2031 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2032 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2034 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2035 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2036 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2037 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2039 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2041 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2043 ** Improved robustness
2045 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2046 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2047 no matter how large the result.
2049 ** Improved portability
2051 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2052 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2054 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2056 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2057 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2058 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2060 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2061 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2065 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2066 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2068 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2070 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2071 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2072 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2073 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2075 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2076 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2078 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2079 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2080 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2082 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2084 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2085 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2087 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2088 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2090 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2092 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2093 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2095 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2096 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2098 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2099 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2100 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2102 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2104 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2106 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2110 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2112 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2113 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2114 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2116 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2117 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2119 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2120 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2121 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2123 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2124 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2126 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2127 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2128 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2129 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2131 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2132 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2134 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2135 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2136 the file system does not support it.
2138 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2140 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2141 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2143 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2145 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2146 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2148 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2149 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2150 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2151 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2153 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2154 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2157 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2158 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2159 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2160 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2162 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2163 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2164 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2165 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2167 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2168 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2170 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2172 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2173 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2174 reporting incorrect results.
2178 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2179 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2181 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2184 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2186 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2187 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2189 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2190 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2192 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2195 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2196 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2197 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2198 the file name does not look like a page range.
2200 printf has several changes:
2202 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2203 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2205 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2206 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2207 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2209 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2210 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2213 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2214 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2216 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2217 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2219 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2221 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2222 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2224 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2226 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2228 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2229 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2230 when first encountering the directory.
2234 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2235 output; POSIX requires this.
2237 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2238 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2240 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2242 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2243 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2245 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2246 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2248 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2249 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2250 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2251 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2252 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2253 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2254 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2256 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2257 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2258 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2260 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2261 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2263 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2265 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2267 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2268 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2269 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2270 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2272 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2276 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2277 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2278 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2279 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2280 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2282 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2283 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2284 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2286 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2287 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2289 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2290 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2292 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2293 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2294 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2295 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2296 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2298 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2299 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2301 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2302 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2304 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2306 nocreat do not create the output file
2307 excl fail if the output file already exists
2308 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2309 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2311 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2313 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2314 direct use direct I/O for data
2315 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2316 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2317 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2318 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2319 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2321 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2323 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2324 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2327 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2328 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2329 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2330 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2331 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2332 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2334 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2335 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2337 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2340 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2342 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2344 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2345 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2347 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2348 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2349 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2351 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2352 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2353 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2355 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2357 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2358 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2360 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2361 for compatibility with bash.
2363 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2365 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2366 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2367 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2368 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2370 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2371 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2373 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2374 ls supports TABSIZE.
2375 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2376 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2377 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2379 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2382 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2384 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2385 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2386 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2387 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2388 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2389 an offset, not as a file name.
2391 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2392 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2394 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2395 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2397 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2398 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2400 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2401 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2402 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2404 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2405 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2407 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2408 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2412 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2414 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2416 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2420 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2421 or more arguments between partitions.
2423 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2424 holes in the destination.
2426 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2427 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2428 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2429 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2430 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2431 terminates immediately.
2433 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2435 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2437 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2438 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2439 not the empty string.
2441 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2442 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2446 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2447 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2448 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2451 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2458 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2462 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2463 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2465 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2466 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2468 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2469 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2470 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2473 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2477 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2478 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2480 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2481 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2483 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2484 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2485 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2487 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2489 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2492 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2494 ** Configuration option
2496 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2497 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2501 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2502 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2506 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2507 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2508 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2511 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2512 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2513 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2514 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2515 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2516 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2517 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2520 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2524 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2525 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2526 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2528 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2529 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2531 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2533 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2534 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2535 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2536 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2538 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2540 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2541 not just the ones that reference directories
2543 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2544 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2546 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2547 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2548 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2550 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2551 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2552 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2553 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2554 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2555 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2557 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2562 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2563 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2565 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2567 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2569 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2571 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2572 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2574 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2575 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2577 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2579 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2583 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2585 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2587 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2588 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2589 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2590 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2591 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2593 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2594 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2596 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2597 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2599 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2600 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2602 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2603 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2604 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2608 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2609 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2610 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2611 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2612 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2613 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2614 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2615 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2616 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2617 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2618 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2619 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2620 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2621 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2623 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2625 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2626 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2628 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2630 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2632 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2633 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2635 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2637 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2638 without a trailing newline.
2640 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2641 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2643 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2646 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2650 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2652 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2654 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2655 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2656 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2657 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2659 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2661 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2662 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2663 be printed without leading spaces.
2665 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2666 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2671 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2672 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2673 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2675 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2677 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2678 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2680 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2681 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2683 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2684 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2686 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2688 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2690 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2692 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2693 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2695 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2697 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2699 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2700 byte offsets are specified.
2703 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2706 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2709 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2710 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2711 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2712 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2713 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2714 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2715 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2716 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2717 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2718 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2719 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2720 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2721 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2722 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2723 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2724 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2725 directory where M has write access.
2726 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2727 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2728 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2731 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2732 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2733 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2734 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2735 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2736 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2737 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2738 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2739 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2740 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2741 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2742 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2743 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2744 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2745 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2746 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2747 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2748 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2749 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2750 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2751 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2752 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2753 appeared one additional time.
2755 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2756 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2757 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2758 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2761 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2762 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2763 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2764 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2765 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2766 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2767 if there were more than 338.
2769 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2770 - false --help now exits nonzero
2773 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2774 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2775 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2776 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2779 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2780 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2781 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2782 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2783 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2786 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2787 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2788 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2789 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2790 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2791 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2792 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2795 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2796 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2797 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2798 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2799 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2800 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2802 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2803 under certain unusual conditions
2804 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2805 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2808 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2809 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2810 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2811 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2812 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2813 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2814 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2815 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2816 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2817 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2818 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2819 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2820 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2821 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2822 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2823 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2826 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2827 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2830 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2831 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2832 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2833 involving hard-linked directories
2834 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2835 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2836 character-special and block files
2839 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2840 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2841 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2842 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2843 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2844 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2845 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2846 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2847 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2849 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2850 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2851 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2852 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2853 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2854 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2855 specified on the command line.
2856 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2857 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2858 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2859 the first file untouched.
2860 * readlink: new program
2861 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2862 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2863 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2864 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2865 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2866 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2869 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2870 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2871 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2872 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2873 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2874 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2875 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2876 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2877 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2878 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2879 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2880 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2882 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2883 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2884 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2886 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2887 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2888 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2889 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2890 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2891 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2892 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2893 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2896 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2897 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2900 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2901 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2902 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2903 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2904 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2905 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2906 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2909 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2910 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2912 ========================================================================
2913 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2914 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2917 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2919 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2920 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2921 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2922 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2923 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2924 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2925 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2926 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2927 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2928 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2929 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2930 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2932 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2933 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2934 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2935 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2937 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2940 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2942 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2943 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2944 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2945 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2946 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2947 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2948 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2951 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2952 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2953 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2954 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2955 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2956 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2957 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2958 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2959 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2960 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2961 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2962 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2963 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2964 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2965 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2966 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2968 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2969 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2971 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2972 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2973 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2974 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2975 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2976 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2978 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2979 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2980 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2981 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2982 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2983 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2984 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2986 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2987 the source files in the following example:
2988 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2989 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2990 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2991 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2992 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2993 links between source files with --preserve=links
2994 * cp accepts new options:
2995 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2996 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2997 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2998 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2999 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3000 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3001 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3002 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3003 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3005 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3006 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3007 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3008 even though it's older than dest.
3009 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3010 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3011 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3012 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3013 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3015 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3016 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3017 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3018 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3019 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3020 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3021 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3023 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3024 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3025 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3027 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3028 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3029 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3030 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3031 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3032 This is the default.
3034 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3035 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3036 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3037 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3038 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3040 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3043 ========================================================================
3044 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3045 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3048 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3049 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3051 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3052 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3053 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3054 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3055 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3057 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3058 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3059 that specifies a non-directory
3062 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3063 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3064 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3065 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3066 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3067 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3068 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3069 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3070 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3071 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3072 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3073 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3074 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3075 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3076 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3077 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3078 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3079 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3080 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3081 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3082 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3083 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3084 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3085 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3087 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3088 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3089 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3091 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3093 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3094 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3096 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3097 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3098 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3099 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3100 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3102 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3103 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3104 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3105 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3106 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3108 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3110 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3111 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3112 * still more portability fixes
3113 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3114 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3116 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3118 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3120 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3122 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3123 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3124 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3125 there is any time remaining
3126 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3128 ========================================================================
3129 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3130 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3132 This package began as the union of the following:
3133 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3135 ========================================================================
3137 Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3139 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3140 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3141 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3142 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3143 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3144 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.