1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
8 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
9 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
11 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
12 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
14 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
15 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
16 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
18 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
19 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
21 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
22 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
23 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
24 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
28 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
29 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
31 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
34 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
35 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
37 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
39 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
40 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
41 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
43 ** Changes in behavior
45 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
46 rather than its aliased target.
48 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
49 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
50 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
52 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
53 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
54 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
55 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
56 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
57 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
58 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
59 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
61 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
63 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
65 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
66 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
69 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
70 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
71 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
72 control like taskset for example.
74 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
75 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
76 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning.
78 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
79 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
80 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
81 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
83 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
84 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
85 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
87 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
88 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
89 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
92 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
96 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
97 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
99 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
101 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
102 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
104 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
105 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
106 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
107 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
109 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
110 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
111 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
115 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
116 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
118 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
119 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
120 duration after the initial signal was sent.
122 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
123 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
124 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
125 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
126 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
127 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
128 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
129 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
130 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
132 ** Changes in behavior
134 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
135 sequence when it would be a no-op.
137 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
138 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
141 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
145 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
146 of available processors, which may not have been the case
147 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
148 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
152 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
153 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
155 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
156 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
157 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
158 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
160 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
161 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
162 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
165 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
169 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
170 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
171 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
173 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
174 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
175 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
177 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
178 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
180 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
181 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
182 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
183 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
185 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
186 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
187 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
189 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
190 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
191 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
192 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
194 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
195 renamed-aside and then recreated.
196 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
198 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
199 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
200 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
201 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
203 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
204 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
205 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
207 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
208 processes will not intersperse their output.
209 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
212 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
216 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
217 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
219 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
220 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
222 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
223 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
224 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
225 the presence of the empty string argument.
226 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
228 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
229 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
230 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
231 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
233 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
234 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
236 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
237 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
238 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
240 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
241 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
242 and with a malicious user on the same system
243 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
244 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
247 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
251 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
252 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
253 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
255 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
256 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
257 offending directory and all "contents."
259 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
260 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
261 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
263 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
264 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
265 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
267 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
268 processes will not intersperse their output.
269 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
270 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
272 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
273 output the name of the file to stdout.
274 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
276 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
277 call fails with errno == EACCES.
278 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
280 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
281 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
284 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
285 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
286 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
288 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
289 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
290 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
291 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
292 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
293 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
295 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
296 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
297 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
298 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
300 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
301 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
303 ** Changes in behavior
305 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
306 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
307 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
308 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
309 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
311 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
312 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
313 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
314 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
316 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
318 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
319 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
320 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
321 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
322 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
326 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
330 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
331 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
333 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
334 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
336 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
337 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
338 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
340 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
341 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
344 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
348 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
349 when the source file doesn't have write access.
350 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
352 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
353 to accommodate leap seconds.
354 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
356 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
357 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
358 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
360 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
362 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
363 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
364 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
366 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
367 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
368 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
369 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
370 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
374 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
375 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
376 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
377 directory or a symlink to a directory.
379 ** Changes in behavior
381 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
382 environment variable is set.
384 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
385 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
386 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
390 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
391 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
392 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
393 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
395 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
396 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
397 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
398 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
402 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
403 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
404 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
406 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
407 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
408 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
409 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
410 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
411 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
414 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
415 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
418 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
422 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
423 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
424 and libraries tested at configure time.
425 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
427 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
428 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
430 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
431 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
433 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
434 printing a summary to stderr.
435 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
437 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
438 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
439 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
441 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
442 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
444 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
445 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
446 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
447 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
449 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
450 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
451 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
452 which is relatively unusual.
453 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
455 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
456 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
457 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
458 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
459 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
460 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
461 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
465 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
466 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
467 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
468 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
469 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
473 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
474 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
476 ** Changes in behavior
478 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
479 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
480 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
481 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
482 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
485 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
489 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
490 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
492 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
493 before data copying has started.
495 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
496 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
498 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
499 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
500 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
501 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
503 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
504 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
505 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
506 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
508 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
513 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
514 for its standard streams.
516 ** Changes in behavior
518 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
519 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
520 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
521 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
522 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
523 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
525 ** Deprecated options
527 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
528 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
532 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
534 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
535 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
538 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
540 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
541 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
543 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
544 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
547 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
551 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
552 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
553 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
554 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
556 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
557 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
558 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
559 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
560 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
565 make check: two tests have been corrected
569 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
570 inherited from gnulib.
573 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
577 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
578 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
579 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
580 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
582 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
583 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
585 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
587 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
588 systems without xattr support.
590 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
591 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
592 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
594 ** Changes in behavior
596 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
597 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
598 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
599 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
601 ** Improved robustness
603 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
604 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
605 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
606 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
607 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
608 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
609 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
610 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
611 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
615 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
616 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
618 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
619 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
620 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
621 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
622 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
625 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
629 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
630 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
631 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
635 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
636 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
637 data was read, or on process exit.
638 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
640 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
641 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
642 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
643 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
645 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
646 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
647 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
648 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
650 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
651 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
653 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
654 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
656 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
657 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
658 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
660 ** Changes in behavior
662 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
663 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
664 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
666 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
667 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
669 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
670 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
671 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
674 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
678 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
680 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
681 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
682 install: Never copies xattrs
684 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
685 from overwriting any existing destination file
687 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
688 mode where this feature is available.
690 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
691 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
692 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
693 do not modify the destination at all.
695 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
697 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
701 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
702 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
704 cp uses much less memory in some situations
706 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
707 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
709 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
710 processing the first file name
712 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
713 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
714 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
715 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
717 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
718 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
720 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
721 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
724 ** Changes in behavior
726 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
727 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
729 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
730 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
731 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
733 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
734 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
736 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
738 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
739 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
740 is still marked with a '+'.
743 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
747 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
748 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
752 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
753 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
754 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
755 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
756 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
757 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
759 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
760 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
762 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
763 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
765 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
767 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
768 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
769 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
771 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
772 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
774 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
775 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
776 used to factor large numbers.
778 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
781 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
783 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
785 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
786 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
788 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
789 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
790 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
791 maximum command-line (argv) length.
793 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
794 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
795 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
797 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
798 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
802 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
804 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
805 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
807 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
808 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
810 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
812 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
813 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
817 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
818 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
819 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
821 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
823 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
824 no matter how many files are in a given directory
826 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
827 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
828 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
830 ** Changes in behavior
832 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
833 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
836 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
840 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
842 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
843 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
844 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
846 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
847 with no USERNAME argument.
849 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
850 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
851 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
853 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
854 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
855 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
856 number of fields for some inputs.
858 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
859 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
861 ** Changes in behavior
863 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
864 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
867 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
871 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
873 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
874 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
875 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
876 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
878 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
879 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
881 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
882 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
884 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
885 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
887 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
888 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
889 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
890 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
892 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
893 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
894 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
895 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
896 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
897 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
899 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
900 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
902 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
903 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
904 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
906 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
907 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
909 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
910 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
912 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
913 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
914 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
915 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
917 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
918 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
920 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
921 in more cases when a directory is empty.
923 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
924 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
925 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
929 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
930 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
932 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
933 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
934 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
935 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
939 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
940 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
942 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
944 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
948 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
949 which have negative errno values.
953 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
957 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
961 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
962 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
965 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
969 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
970 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
971 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
973 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
974 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
975 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
976 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
980 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
981 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
982 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
983 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
986 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
990 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
992 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
993 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
994 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
997 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1001 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1002 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1004 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1006 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1008 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1010 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1014 ** Changes in behavior
1016 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1017 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1019 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1020 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1022 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1023 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1024 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1028 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1029 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1030 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1031 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1032 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1033 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1034 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1035 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1036 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1037 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1038 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1040 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1041 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1042 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1045 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1048 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1049 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1050 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1052 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1053 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1054 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1057 ** New build options
1059 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1060 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1061 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1062 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1064 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1065 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1066 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1067 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1068 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1069 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1070 of "make check" fail.
1072 ** Remove deprecated options
1074 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1075 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1076 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1077 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1078 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1080 ** Improved robustness
1082 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1083 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1084 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1085 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1086 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1087 loss of the contents of a/f.
1089 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1090 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1094 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1095 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1096 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1098 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1099 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1100 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1101 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1103 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1104 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1105 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1106 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1107 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1108 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1109 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1110 destination is a symlink.
1112 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1114 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1115 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1117 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1118 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1120 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1122 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1123 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1125 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1126 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1128 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1131 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1132 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1134 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1135 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1137 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1138 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1139 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1140 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1142 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1143 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1144 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1146 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1147 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1148 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1150 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1151 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1152 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1153 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1155 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1156 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1157 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1159 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1160 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1162 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1163 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1165 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1167 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1168 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1169 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1171 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1172 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1174 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1175 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1177 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1178 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1180 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1181 [present in the original version]
1184 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1188 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1190 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1191 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1192 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1194 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1195 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1197 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1201 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1202 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1204 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1205 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1207 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1208 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1210 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1211 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1212 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1213 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1214 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1215 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1217 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1218 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1221 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1222 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1224 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1227 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1228 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1229 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1231 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1232 directory is unreadable.
1234 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1235 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1236 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1238 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1239 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1240 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1241 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1242 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1245 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1246 Before it would print nothing.
1248 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1250 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1251 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1252 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1253 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1254 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1255 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1256 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1257 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1259 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1263 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1264 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1265 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1267 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1268 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1269 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1270 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1273 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1277 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1278 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1279 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1280 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1281 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1282 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1283 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1285 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1286 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1287 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1288 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1289 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1290 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1291 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1292 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1294 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1295 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1296 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1299 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1303 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1304 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1306 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1307 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1308 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1310 ** Improved robustness
1312 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1313 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1314 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1317 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1321 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1322 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1323 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1324 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1325 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1327 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1331 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1334 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1338 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1339 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1340 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1341 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1343 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1344 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1346 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1347 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1348 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1351 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1353 ** Improved robustness
1355 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1356 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1358 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1359 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1360 or NFS-mounted partition.
1362 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1363 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1367 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1368 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1369 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1370 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1371 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1372 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1374 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1375 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1377 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1378 or neglect to report file removal.
1380 For the "groups" command:
1382 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1383 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1385 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1387 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1389 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1393 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1394 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1397 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1399 ** Changes in behavior
1401 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1402 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1403 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1404 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1406 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1407 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1408 a final `./' or `../' component.
1410 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1411 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1412 this only for pipes.
1414 ** Infrastructure changes
1416 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1417 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1418 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1419 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1423 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1424 name is "." or "..".
1426 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1427 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1428 dirent.d_type support.
1430 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1431 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1433 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1434 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1435 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1436 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1439 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1441 ** Changes in behavior
1443 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1447 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1448 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1452 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1453 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1454 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1456 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1457 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1459 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1460 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1462 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1464 ** Improved robustness
1466 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1467 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1468 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1470 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1471 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1474 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1475 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1477 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1478 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1480 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1481 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1483 ** Changes in behavior
1485 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1486 where the two are distinct.
1488 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1489 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1490 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1491 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1492 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1493 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1494 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1495 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1496 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1497 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1498 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1499 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1500 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1501 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1502 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1503 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1504 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1506 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1507 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1508 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1510 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1511 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1512 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1513 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1516 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1517 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1521 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1522 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1523 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1524 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1526 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1527 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1528 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1530 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1531 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1532 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1533 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1534 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1537 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1538 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1540 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1541 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1542 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1543 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1545 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1546 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1547 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1549 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1550 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1551 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1552 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1554 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1555 and sticky) with the -m option.
1557 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1558 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1559 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1560 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1561 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1563 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1564 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1566 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1570 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1571 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1572 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1573 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1575 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1577 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1579 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1580 silently ignoring one of them.
1582 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1583 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1584 containing this change was 5.92.
1586 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1587 automatically newline terminated.
1589 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1590 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1591 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1592 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1595 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1596 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1597 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1600 ** Scheduled for removal
1602 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1603 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1605 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1606 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1607 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1608 command to unlink a directory.
1610 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1611 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1612 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1613 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1617 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1618 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1619 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1620 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1621 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1622 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1626 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1627 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1629 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1631 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1632 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1633 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1635 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1636 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1639 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1640 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1642 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1643 list directories before files.
1645 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1646 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1647 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1648 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1651 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1653 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1655 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1656 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1657 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1659 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1660 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1664 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1665 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1666 usually printing nothing.
1668 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1670 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1671 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1672 them with hard-linked directories.
1674 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1675 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1676 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1678 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1679 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1680 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1682 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1685 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1686 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1688 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1689 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1691 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1692 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1694 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1695 all command-line arguments.
1697 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1699 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1701 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1702 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1704 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1706 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1707 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1708 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1709 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1710 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1712 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1713 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1715 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1716 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1717 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1718 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1720 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1722 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1726 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1727 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1729 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1730 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1732 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1733 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1735 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1736 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1738 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1739 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1741 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1743 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1744 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1745 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1748 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1750 ** Build-related bug fixes
1752 installing .mo files would fail
1755 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1759 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1761 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1764 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1768 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1769 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1773 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1775 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1776 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1778 ** Deprecated options
1780 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1781 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1783 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1787 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1789 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1790 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1791 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1792 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1794 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1797 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1803 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1808 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1810 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1812 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1813 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1814 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1816 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1817 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1818 problematic usages. These include:
1820 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1821 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1822 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1823 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1824 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1825 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1826 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1827 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1828 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1830 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1831 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1833 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1834 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1835 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1836 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1838 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1839 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1840 between binary and text files.
1842 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1846 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1850 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1851 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1853 head tac tail tee tr
1854 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1856 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1857 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1859 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1860 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1861 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1863 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1865 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1867 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1868 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1869 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1873 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1875 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1876 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1878 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1879 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1880 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1884 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1885 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1889 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1890 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1891 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1895 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1896 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1900 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1902 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1904 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1908 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1909 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1910 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1912 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1913 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1914 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1915 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1916 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1918 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
1922 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
1923 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
1924 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
1926 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
1928 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
1929 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
1930 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
1931 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
1933 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
1935 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
1936 rather than silently wrapping around.
1938 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
1939 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
1941 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
1942 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
1944 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
1945 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
1946 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
1947 file /tmp/a/b/file".
1949 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
1951 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
1953 ** Improved robustness
1955 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
1956 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
1957 no matter how large the result.
1959 ** Improved portability
1961 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
1962 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
1964 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
1966 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
1967 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
1968 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
1970 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
1971 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
1975 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
1976 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
1978 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
1980 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
1981 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
1982 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
1983 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
1985 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
1986 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
1988 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
1989 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
1990 categories if not specified by dircolors.
1992 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
1994 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
1995 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
1997 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
1998 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2000 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2002 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2003 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2005 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2006 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2008 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2009 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2010 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2012 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2014 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2016 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2020 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2022 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2023 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2024 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2026 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2027 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2029 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2030 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2031 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2033 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2034 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2036 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2037 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2038 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2039 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2041 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2042 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2044 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2045 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2046 the file system does not support it.
2048 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2050 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2051 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2053 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2055 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2056 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2058 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2059 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2060 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2061 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2063 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2064 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2067 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2068 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2069 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2070 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2072 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2073 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2074 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2075 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2077 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2078 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2080 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2082 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2083 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2084 reporting incorrect results.
2088 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2089 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2091 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2094 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2096 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2097 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2099 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2100 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2102 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2105 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2106 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2107 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2108 the file name does not look like a page range.
2110 printf has several changes:
2112 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2113 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2115 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2116 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2117 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2119 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2120 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2123 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2124 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2126 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2127 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2129 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2131 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2132 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2134 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2136 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2138 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2139 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2140 when first encountering the directory.
2144 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2145 output; POSIX requires this.
2147 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2148 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2150 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2152 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2153 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2155 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2156 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2158 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2159 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2160 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2161 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2162 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2163 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2164 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2166 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2167 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2168 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2170 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2171 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2173 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2175 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2177 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2178 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2179 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2180 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2182 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2186 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2187 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2188 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2189 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2190 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2192 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2193 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2194 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2196 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2197 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2199 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2200 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2202 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2203 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2204 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2205 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2206 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2208 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2209 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2211 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2212 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2214 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2216 nocreat do not create the output file
2217 excl fail if the output file already exists
2218 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2219 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2221 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2223 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2224 direct use direct I/O for data
2225 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2226 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2227 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2228 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2229 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2231 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2233 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2234 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2237 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2238 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2239 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2240 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2241 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2242 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2244 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2245 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2247 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2250 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2252 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2254 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2255 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2257 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2258 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2259 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2261 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2262 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2263 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2265 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2267 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2268 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2270 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2271 for compatibility with bash.
2273 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2275 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2276 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2277 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2278 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2280 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2281 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2283 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2284 ls supports TABSIZE.
2285 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2286 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2287 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2289 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2292 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2294 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2295 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2296 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2297 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2298 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2299 an offset, not as a file name.
2301 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2302 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2304 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2305 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2307 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2308 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2310 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2311 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2312 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2314 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2315 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2317 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2318 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2322 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2324 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2326 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2330 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2331 or more arguments between partitions.
2333 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2334 holes in the destination.
2336 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2337 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2338 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2339 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2340 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2341 terminates immediately.
2343 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2345 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2347 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2348 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2349 not the empty string.
2351 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2352 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2356 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2357 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2358 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2361 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2368 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2372 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2373 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2375 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2376 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2378 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2379 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2380 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2383 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2387 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2388 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2390 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2391 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2393 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2394 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2395 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2397 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2399 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2402 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2404 ** Configuration option
2406 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2407 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2411 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2412 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2416 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2417 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2418 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2421 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2422 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2423 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2424 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2425 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2426 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2427 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2430 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2434 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2435 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2436 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2438 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2439 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2441 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2443 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2444 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2445 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2446 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2448 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2450 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2451 not just the ones that reference directories
2453 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2454 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2456 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2457 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2458 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2460 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2461 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2462 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2463 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2464 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2465 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2467 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2472 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2473 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2475 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2477 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2479 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2481 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2482 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2484 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2485 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2487 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2489 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2493 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2495 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2497 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2498 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2499 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2500 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2501 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2503 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2504 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2506 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2507 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2509 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2510 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2512 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2513 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2514 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2518 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2519 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2520 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2521 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2522 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2523 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2524 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2525 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2526 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2527 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2528 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2529 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2530 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2531 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2533 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2535 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2536 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2538 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2540 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2542 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2543 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2545 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2547 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2548 without a trailing newline.
2550 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2551 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2553 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2556 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2560 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2562 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2564 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2565 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2566 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2567 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2569 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2571 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2572 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2573 be printed without leading spaces.
2575 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2576 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2581 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2582 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2583 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2585 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2587 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2588 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2590 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2591 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2593 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2594 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2596 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2598 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2600 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2602 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2603 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2605 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2607 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2609 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2610 byte offsets are specified.
2613 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2616 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2619 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2620 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2621 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2622 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2623 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2624 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2625 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2626 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2627 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2628 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2629 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2630 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2631 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2632 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2633 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2634 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2635 directory where M has write access.
2636 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2637 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2638 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2641 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2642 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2643 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2644 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2645 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2646 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2647 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2648 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2649 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2650 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2651 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2652 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2653 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2654 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2655 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2656 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2657 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2658 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2659 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2660 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2661 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2662 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2663 appeared one additional time.
2665 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2666 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2667 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2668 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2671 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2672 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2673 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2674 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2675 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2676 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2677 if there were more than 338.
2679 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2680 - false --help now exits nonzero
2683 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2684 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2685 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2686 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2689 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2690 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2691 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2692 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2693 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2696 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2697 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2698 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2699 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2700 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2701 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2702 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2705 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2706 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2707 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2708 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2709 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2710 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2712 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2713 under certain unusual conditions
2714 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2715 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2718 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2719 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2720 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2721 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2722 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2723 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2724 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2725 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2726 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2727 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2728 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2729 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2730 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2731 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2732 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2733 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2736 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2737 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2740 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2741 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2742 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2743 involving hard-linked directories
2744 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2745 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2746 character-special and block files
2749 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2750 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2751 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2752 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2753 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2754 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2755 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2756 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2757 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2759 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2760 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2761 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2762 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2763 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2764 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2765 specified on the command line.
2766 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2767 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2768 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2769 the first file untouched.
2770 * readlink: new program
2771 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2772 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2773 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2774 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2775 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2776 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2779 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2780 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2781 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2782 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2783 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2784 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2785 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2786 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2787 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2788 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2789 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2790 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2792 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2793 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2794 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2796 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2797 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2798 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2799 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2800 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2801 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2802 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2803 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2806 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2807 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2810 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2811 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2812 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2813 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2814 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2815 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2816 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2819 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2820 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2822 ========================================================================
2823 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2824 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2827 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2829 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2830 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2831 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2832 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2833 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2834 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2835 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2836 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2837 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2838 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2839 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2840 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2842 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2843 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2844 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2845 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2847 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2850 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2852 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2853 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2854 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2855 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2856 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2857 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2858 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2861 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2862 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2863 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2864 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2865 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2866 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2867 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2868 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2869 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2870 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2871 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2872 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2873 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2874 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2875 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2876 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2878 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2879 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2881 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2882 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2883 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2884 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2885 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2886 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2888 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2889 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2890 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2891 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2892 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2893 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2894 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2896 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2897 the source files in the following example:
2898 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2899 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2900 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2901 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2902 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2903 links between source files with --preserve=links
2904 * cp accepts new options:
2905 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2906 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2907 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2908 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2909 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2910 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2911 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2912 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2913 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2915 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2916 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2917 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2918 even though it's older than dest.
2919 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
2920 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
2921 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
2922 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
2923 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
2925 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
2926 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
2927 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
2928 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
2929 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
2930 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
2931 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
2933 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
2934 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
2935 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
2937 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
2938 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
2939 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
2940 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
2941 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
2942 This is the default.
2944 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
2945 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
2946 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
2947 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
2948 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
2950 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
2953 ========================================================================
2954 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
2955 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2958 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
2959 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
2961 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2962 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
2963 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
2964 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
2965 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
2967 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
2968 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
2969 that specifies a non-directory
2972 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
2973 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
2974 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
2975 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
2976 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2977 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
2978 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
2979 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2980 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
2981 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
2982 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
2983 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
2984 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
2985 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
2986 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
2987 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
2988 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
2989 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
2990 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
2991 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
2992 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
2993 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
2994 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
2995 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
2997 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
2998 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
2999 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3001 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3003 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3004 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3006 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3007 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3008 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3009 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3010 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3012 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3013 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3014 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3015 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3016 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3018 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3020 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3021 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3022 * still more portability fixes
3023 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3024 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3026 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3028 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3030 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3032 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3033 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3034 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3035 there is any time remaining
3036 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3038 ========================================================================
3039 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3040 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3042 This package began as the union of the following:
3043 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3045 ========================================================================
3047 Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3049 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3050 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3051 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3052 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3053 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3054 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.