1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
8 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
9 sha384sum and sha512sum.
13 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
14 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
15 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
16 eventually exits nonzero.
18 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
19 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
20 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
22 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
23 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
24 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
28 stat and tail work better with ZFS and VZFS. stat -f --format=%T now
29 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files
30 on those file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file system
31 types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
34 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
38 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
39 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
40 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
41 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
43 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
44 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
45 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
46 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
48 sort -u could read freed memory.
49 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
50 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
51 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
55 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
56 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
57 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
58 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
61 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
65 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
66 processes will not intersperse their output.
67 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
69 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
70 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
71 date: invalid date '\260'
72 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
74 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
75 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
76 lines output by df, can work reliably.
77 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
79 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
80 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
81 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
83 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
84 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
85 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
86 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
87 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
88 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
90 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
91 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
93 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
94 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
96 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
97 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
98 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
100 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
101 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
102 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
106 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
108 ** Changes in behavior
110 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
111 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
112 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
113 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
114 have any reason to include it here.
118 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
119 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
120 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
122 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
123 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
124 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
127 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
131 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
132 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
133 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
134 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
135 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
136 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
138 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
139 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
140 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
141 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
142 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
143 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
144 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
146 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
147 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
149 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
150 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
154 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
155 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
157 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
159 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
161 ** Changes in behavior
163 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
164 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
165 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
167 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
168 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
171 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
175 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
176 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
177 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
178 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
179 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
180 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
181 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
182 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
184 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
185 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
186 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
187 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
188 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
190 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
191 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
193 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
194 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
196 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
197 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
199 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
200 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
202 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
203 additional static suffix to output file names.
205 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
206 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
207 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
209 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
210 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
214 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
215 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
216 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
218 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
219 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
220 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
221 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
222 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
223 typically still point to one of the hard links.
225 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
226 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
227 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
228 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
229 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
231 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
232 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
233 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
234 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
238 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
239 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
240 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
242 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
243 instead of causing a usage failure.
245 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
248 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
252 realpath: print resolved file names.
256 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
257 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
259 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
260 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
262 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
263 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
264 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
265 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
266 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
267 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
269 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
270 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
271 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
273 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
274 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
275 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
277 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
278 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
279 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
280 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
281 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
283 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
285 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
286 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
288 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
289 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
290 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
292 ** Changes in behavior
294 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
295 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
296 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
297 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
298 usually-short referent instead.
300 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
301 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
302 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
303 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
306 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
310 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
311 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
312 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
314 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
315 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
317 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
318 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
322 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
323 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
325 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
326 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
327 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
328 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
330 ** Changes in behavior
332 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
333 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
334 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
338 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
339 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
340 only .tar.xz files is enough.
343 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
347 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
348 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
349 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
351 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
352 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
354 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
355 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
356 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
357 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
358 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
360 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
361 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
362 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
363 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
364 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
365 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
366 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
367 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
369 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
370 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
372 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
373 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
375 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
376 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
378 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
379 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
380 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
382 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
383 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
384 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
385 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
387 ** Changes in behavior
389 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
390 when -v or -c specified.
392 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
393 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
397 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
398 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
399 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
400 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
401 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
403 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
404 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
405 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
407 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
408 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
409 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
410 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
411 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
412 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
413 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
415 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
416 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
417 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
421 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
422 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
424 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
427 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
428 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
430 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
431 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
433 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
434 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
436 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
438 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
442 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
443 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
445 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
448 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
452 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
453 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
455 ** Changes in behavior
457 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
458 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
459 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
460 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
461 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
462 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
464 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
465 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
466 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
470 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
473 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
477 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
478 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
479 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
481 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
482 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
483 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
485 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
486 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
487 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
489 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
490 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
492 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
493 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
495 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
496 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
498 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
499 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
503 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
504 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
505 processed portion thereof.
507 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
508 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
510 ** Changes in behavior
512 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
513 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
514 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
516 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
517 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
518 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
520 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
521 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
523 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
524 Use --preserve-context instead.
526 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
529 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
533 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
534 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
535 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
536 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
537 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
539 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
540 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
542 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
543 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
544 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
546 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
547 reject file names invalid for that file system.
549 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
550 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
554 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
555 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
556 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
557 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
558 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
559 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
560 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
561 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
563 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
564 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
565 the same number of fields are output for each line.
567 ** Changes in behavior
569 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
570 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
571 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
574 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
578 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
579 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
580 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
583 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
587 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
588 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
590 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
591 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
593 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
594 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
596 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
597 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
598 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
599 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
601 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
602 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
604 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
605 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
606 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
608 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
610 ** Changes in behavior
612 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
613 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
614 to the number of available processors.
618 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
621 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
625 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
626 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
627 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
628 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
630 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
631 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
632 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
634 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
635 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
637 ** Changes in behavior
639 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
640 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
642 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
643 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
644 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
645 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
646 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
647 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
649 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
650 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
651 the same way as the others.
654 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
658 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
659 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
660 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
662 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
663 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
665 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
666 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
667 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
669 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
670 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
672 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
673 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
675 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
676 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
677 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
679 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
680 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
681 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
682 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
686 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
687 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
689 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
692 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
693 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
695 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
697 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
698 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
699 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
701 ** Changes in behavior
703 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
704 rather than its aliased target.
706 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
707 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
708 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
710 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
711 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
712 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
713 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
714 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
715 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
716 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
717 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
719 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
721 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
723 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
724 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
727 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
728 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
729 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
730 control like taskset for example.
732 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
734 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
735 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
736 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
737 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
738 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
739 includes %C when context information is available.
741 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
742 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
743 rather than a file system attribute.
745 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
746 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
747 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
748 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
750 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
751 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
752 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
754 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
755 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
756 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
759 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
763 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
764 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
766 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
768 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
769 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
771 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
772 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
773 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
774 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
776 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
777 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
778 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
782 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
783 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
785 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
786 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
787 duration after the initial signal was sent.
789 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
790 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
791 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
792 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
793 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
794 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
795 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
796 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
797 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
799 ** Changes in behavior
801 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
802 sequence when it would be a no-op.
804 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
805 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
808 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
812 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
813 of available processors, which may not have been the case
814 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
815 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
819 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
820 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
822 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
823 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
824 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
825 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
827 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
828 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
829 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
832 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
836 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
837 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
838 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
840 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
841 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
842 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
844 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
845 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
847 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
848 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
849 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
850 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
852 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
853 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
854 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
856 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
857 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
858 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
859 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
861 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
862 renamed-aside and then recreated.
863 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
865 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
866 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
867 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
868 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
870 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
871 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
872 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
874 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
875 processes will not intersperse their output.
876 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
879 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
883 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
884 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
886 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
887 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
889 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
890 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
891 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
892 the presence of the empty string argument.
893 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
895 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
896 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
897 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
898 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
900 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
901 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
903 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
904 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
905 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
907 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
908 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
909 and with a malicious user on the same system
910 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
911 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
914 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
918 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
919 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
920 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
922 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
923 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
924 offending directory and all "contents."
926 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
927 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
928 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
930 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
931 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
932 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
934 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
935 processes will not intersperse their output.
936 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
937 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
939 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
940 output the name of the file to stdout.
941 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
943 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
944 call fails with errno == EACCES.
945 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
947 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
948 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
951 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
952 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
953 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
955 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
956 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
957 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
958 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
959 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
960 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
962 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
963 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
964 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
965 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
967 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
968 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
970 ** Changes in behavior
972 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
973 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
974 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
975 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
976 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
978 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
979 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
980 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
981 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
983 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
985 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
986 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
987 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
988 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
989 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
993 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
997 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
998 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1000 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1001 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1003 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1004 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1005 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1007 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1008 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1011 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1015 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1016 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1017 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1019 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1020 to accommodate leap seconds.
1021 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1023 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1024 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1025 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1027 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1029 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1030 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1031 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1033 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1034 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1035 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1036 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1037 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1041 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1042 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1043 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1044 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1046 ** Changes in behavior
1048 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1049 environment variable is set.
1051 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1052 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1053 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1057 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1058 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1059 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1060 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1062 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1063 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1064 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1065 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1069 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1070 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1071 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1073 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1074 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1075 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1076 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1077 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1078 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1079 another improvement:
1081 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1082 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1085 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1089 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1090 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1091 and libraries tested at configure time.
1092 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1094 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1095 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1097 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1098 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1100 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1101 printing a summary to stderr.
1102 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1104 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1105 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1106 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1108 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1109 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1111 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1112 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1113 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1114 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1116 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1117 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1118 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1119 which is relatively unusual.
1120 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1122 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1123 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1124 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1125 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1126 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1127 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1128 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1132 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1133 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1134 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1135 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1136 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1140 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1141 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1143 ** Changes in behavior
1145 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1146 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1147 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1148 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1149 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1152 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1156 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1157 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1159 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1160 before data copying has started.
1162 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1163 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1165 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1166 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1167 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1168 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1170 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1171 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1172 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1173 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1175 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1180 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1181 for its standard streams.
1183 ** Changes in behavior
1185 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1186 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1187 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1188 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1189 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1190 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1192 ** Deprecated options
1194 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1195 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1199 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1201 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1202 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1203 a btrfs file system.
1205 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1207 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1208 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1210 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1211 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1214 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1218 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1219 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1220 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1221 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1223 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1224 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1225 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1226 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1227 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1232 make check: two tests have been corrected
1236 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1237 inherited from gnulib.
1240 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1244 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1245 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1246 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1247 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1249 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1250 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1252 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1254 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1255 systems without xattr support.
1257 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1258 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1259 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1261 ** Changes in behavior
1263 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1264 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1265 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1266 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1268 ** Improved robustness
1270 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1271 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1272 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1273 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1274 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1275 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1276 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1277 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1278 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1282 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1283 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1285 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1286 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1287 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1288 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1289 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1292 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1296 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1297 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1298 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1302 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1303 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1304 data was read, or on process exit.
1305 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1307 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1308 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1309 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1310 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1312 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1313 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1314 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1315 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1317 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1318 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1320 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1321 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1323 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1324 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1325 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1327 ** Changes in behavior
1329 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1330 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1331 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1333 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1334 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1336 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1337 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1338 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1341 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1345 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1347 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1348 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1349 install: Never copies xattrs
1351 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1352 from overwriting any existing destination file
1354 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1355 mode where this feature is available.
1357 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1358 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1359 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1360 do not modify the destination at all.
1362 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1364 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1368 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1369 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1371 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1373 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1374 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1376 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1377 processing the first file name
1379 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1380 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1381 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1382 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1384 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1385 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1387 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1388 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1391 ** Changes in behavior
1393 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1394 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1396 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1397 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1398 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1400 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1401 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1403 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1405 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1406 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1407 is still marked with a '+'.
1410 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1414 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1415 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1419 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1420 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1421 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1422 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1423 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1424 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1426 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1427 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1429 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1430 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1432 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1434 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1435 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1436 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1438 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1439 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1441 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1442 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1443 used to factor large numbers.
1445 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1448 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1450 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1452 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1453 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1455 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1456 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1457 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1458 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1460 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1461 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1462 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1464 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1465 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1469 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1471 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1472 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1474 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1475 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1477 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1479 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1480 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1484 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1485 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1486 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1488 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1490 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1491 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1492 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1494 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1495 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1496 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1498 ** Changes in behavior
1500 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1501 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1504 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1508 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1509 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1510 'futimens' system calls.
1514 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1516 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1517 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1518 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1520 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1521 with no USERNAME argument.
1523 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1524 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1525 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1527 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1528 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1529 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1530 number of fields for some inputs.
1532 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1533 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1535 ** Changes in behavior
1537 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1538 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1541 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1545 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1547 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1548 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1549 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1550 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1552 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1553 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1555 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1556 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1558 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1559 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1561 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1562 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1563 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1564 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1566 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1567 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1568 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1569 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1570 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1571 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1573 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1574 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1576 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1577 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1578 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1580 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1581 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1583 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1584 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1586 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1587 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1588 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1589 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1591 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1592 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1594 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1595 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1597 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1598 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1599 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1603 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1604 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1606 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1607 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1608 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1609 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1613 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1614 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1616 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1618 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1622 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1623 which have negative errno values.
1627 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1631 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1635 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1636 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1639 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1643 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1644 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1645 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1647 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1648 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1649 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1650 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1654 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1655 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1656 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1657 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1660 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1664 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1666 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1667 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1668 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1671 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1675 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1676 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1678 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1680 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1682 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1684 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1688 ** Changes in behavior
1690 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1691 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1693 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1694 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1696 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1697 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1698 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1702 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1703 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1704 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1705 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1706 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1707 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1708 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1709 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1710 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1711 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1712 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1714 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1715 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1716 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1719 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1722 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1723 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1724 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1726 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1727 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1728 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1731 ** New build options
1733 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1734 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1735 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1736 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1738 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1739 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1740 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1741 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1742 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1743 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1744 of "make check" fail.
1746 ** Remove deprecated options
1748 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1749 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1750 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1751 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1752 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1754 ** Improved robustness
1756 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1757 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1758 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1759 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1760 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1761 loss of the contents of a/f.
1763 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1764 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1768 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1769 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1770 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1772 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1773 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1774 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1775 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1777 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1778 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1779 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1780 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1781 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1782 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1783 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1784 destination is a symlink.
1786 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1788 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1789 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1791 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1792 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1794 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1796 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1797 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1799 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1800 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1802 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1805 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1806 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1808 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1809 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1811 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1812 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1813 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1814 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1816 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1817 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1818 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1820 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1821 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1822 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1824 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1825 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1826 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1827 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1829 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1830 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1831 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1833 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1834 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1836 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1837 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1839 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1841 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1842 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1843 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1845 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1846 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1848 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1849 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1851 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1852 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1854 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1855 [present in the original version]
1858 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1862 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1864 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1865 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1866 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1868 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1869 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1871 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1875 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1876 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1878 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1879 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1881 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1882 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1884 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1885 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1886 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1887 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1888 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1889 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1891 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1892 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1895 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1896 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1898 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1901 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1902 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1903 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1905 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1906 directory is unreadable.
1908 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1909 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1910 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1912 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1913 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1914 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1915 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1916 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1919 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1920 Before it would print nothing.
1922 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1924 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1925 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1926 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1927 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1928 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1929 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1930 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1931 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1933 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1937 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1938 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1939 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1941 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1942 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1943 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1944 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1947 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1951 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1952 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1953 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1954 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1955 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1956 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1957 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1959 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1960 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1961 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1962 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1963 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1964 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1965 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1966 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1968 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1969 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1970 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1973 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1977 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1978 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1980 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1981 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1982 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1984 ** Improved robustness
1986 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1987 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1988 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1991 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1995 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1996 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1997 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1998 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1999 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2001 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2005 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2008 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2012 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2013 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2014 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2015 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2017 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2018 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2020 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2021 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2022 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2025 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2027 ** Improved robustness
2029 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2030 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2032 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2033 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2034 or NFS-mounted partition.
2036 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2037 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2041 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2042 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2043 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2044 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2045 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2046 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2048 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2049 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2051 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2052 or neglect to report file removal.
2054 For the "groups" command:
2056 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2057 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2059 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2061 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2063 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2067 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2068 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2071 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2073 ** Changes in behavior
2075 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2076 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2077 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2078 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2080 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2081 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2082 a final './' or '../' component.
2084 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2085 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2086 this only for pipes.
2088 ** Infrastructure changes
2090 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2091 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2092 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2093 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2097 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2098 name is "." or "..".
2100 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2101 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2102 dirent.d_type support.
2104 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2105 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2107 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2108 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2109 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2110 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2113 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2115 ** Changes in behavior
2117 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2121 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2122 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2126 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2127 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2128 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2130 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2131 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2133 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2134 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2136 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2138 ** Improved robustness
2140 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2141 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2142 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2144 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2145 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2148 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2149 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2151 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2152 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2154 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2155 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2157 ** Changes in behavior
2159 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2160 where the two are distinct.
2162 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2163 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2164 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2165 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2166 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2167 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2168 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2169 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2170 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2171 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2172 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2173 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2174 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2175 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2176 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2177 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2178 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2180 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2181 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2182 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2184 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2185 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2186 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2187 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2190 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2191 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2195 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2196 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2197 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2198 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2200 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2201 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2202 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2204 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2205 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2206 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2207 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2208 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2211 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2212 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2214 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2215 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2216 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2217 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2219 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2220 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2221 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2223 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2224 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2225 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2226 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2228 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2229 and sticky) with the -m option.
2231 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2232 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2233 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2234 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2235 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2237 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2238 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2240 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2244 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2245 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2246 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2247 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2249 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2251 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2253 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2254 silently ignoring one of them.
2256 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2257 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2258 containing this change was 5.92.
2260 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2261 automatically newline terminated.
2263 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2264 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2265 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2266 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2269 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2270 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2271 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2274 ** Scheduled for removal
2276 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2277 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2279 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2280 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2281 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2282 command to unlink a directory.
2284 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2285 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2286 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2287 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2291 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2292 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2293 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2294 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2295 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2296 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2300 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2301 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2303 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2305 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2306 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2307 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2309 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2310 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2313 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2314 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2316 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2317 list directories before files.
2319 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2320 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2321 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2322 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2325 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2327 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2329 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2330 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2331 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2333 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2334 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2338 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2339 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2340 usually printing nothing.
2342 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2344 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2345 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2346 them with hard-linked directories.
2348 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2349 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2350 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2352 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2353 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2354 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2356 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2359 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2360 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2362 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2363 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2365 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2366 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2368 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2369 all command-line arguments.
2371 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2373 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2375 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2376 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2378 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2380 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2381 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2382 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2383 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2384 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2386 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2387 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2389 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2390 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2391 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2392 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2394 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2396 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2400 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2401 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2403 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2404 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2406 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2407 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2409 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2410 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2412 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2413 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2415 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2417 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2418 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2419 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2422 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2424 ** Build-related bug fixes
2426 installing .mo files would fail
2429 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2433 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2435 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2438 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2442 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2443 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2447 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2449 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2450 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2452 ** Deprecated options
2454 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2455 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2457 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2461 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2463 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2464 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2465 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2466 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2468 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2471 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2477 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2482 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2484 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2486 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2487 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2488 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2490 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2491 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2492 problematic usages. These include:
2494 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2495 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2496 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2497 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2498 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2499 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2500 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2501 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2502 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2504 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2505 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2507 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2508 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2509 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2510 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2512 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2513 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2514 between binary and text files.
2516 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2520 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2524 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2525 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2527 head tac tail tee tr
2528 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2530 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2531 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2533 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2534 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2535 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2537 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2539 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2541 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2542 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2543 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2547 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2549 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2550 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2552 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2553 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2554 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2558 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2559 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2563 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2564 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2565 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2569 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2570 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2574 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2576 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2578 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2582 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2583 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2584 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2586 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2587 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2588 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2589 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2590 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2592 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2596 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2597 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2598 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2600 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2602 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2603 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2604 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2605 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2607 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2609 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2610 rather than silently wrapping around.
2612 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2613 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2615 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2616 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2618 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2619 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2620 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2621 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2623 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2625 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2627 ** Improved robustness
2629 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2630 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2631 no matter how large the result.
2633 ** Improved portability
2635 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2636 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2638 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2640 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2641 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2642 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2644 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2645 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2649 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2650 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2652 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2654 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2655 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2656 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2657 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2659 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2660 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2662 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2663 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2664 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2666 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2668 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2669 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2671 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2672 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2674 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2676 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2677 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2679 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2680 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2682 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2683 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2684 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2686 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2688 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2690 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2694 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2696 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2697 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2698 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2700 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2701 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2703 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2704 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2705 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2707 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2708 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2710 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2711 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2712 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2713 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2715 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2716 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2718 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2719 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2720 the file system does not support it.
2722 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2724 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2725 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2727 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2729 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2730 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2732 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2733 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2734 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2735 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2737 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2738 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2741 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2742 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2743 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2744 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2746 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2747 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2748 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2749 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2751 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2752 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2754 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2756 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2757 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2758 reporting incorrect results.
2762 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2763 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2765 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2768 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2770 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2771 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2773 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2774 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2776 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2779 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2780 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2781 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2782 the file name does not look like a page range.
2784 printf has several changes:
2786 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2787 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2789 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2790 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2791 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2793 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2794 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2797 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2798 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2800 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2801 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2803 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2805 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2806 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2808 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2810 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2812 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2813 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2814 when first encountering the directory.
2818 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2819 output; POSIX requires this.
2821 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2822 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2824 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2826 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2827 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2829 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2830 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2832 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2833 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2834 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2835 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2836 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2837 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2838 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2840 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2841 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2842 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2844 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2845 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2847 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2849 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2851 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2852 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2853 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2854 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2856 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2860 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2861 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2862 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2863 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
2864 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
2866 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2867 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2868 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2870 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2871 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2873 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2874 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2876 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2877 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2878 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2879 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2880 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2882 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2883 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2885 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2886 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2888 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2890 nocreat do not create the output file
2891 excl fail if the output file already exists
2892 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2893 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2895 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2897 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2898 direct use direct I/O for data
2899 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2900 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2901 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2902 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2903 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2905 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2907 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2908 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
2911 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2912 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2913 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2914 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2915 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2916 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2918 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2919 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2921 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2924 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2926 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2928 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2929 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2931 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2932 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2933 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2935 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2936 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2937 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2939 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2941 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2942 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2944 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2945 for compatibility with bash.
2947 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2949 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2950 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2951 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2952 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2954 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2955 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2957 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2958 ls supports TABSIZE.
2959 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2960 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2961 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2963 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2966 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2968 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2969 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2970 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2971 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2972 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2973 an offset, not as a file name.
2975 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2976 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2978 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2979 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2981 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2982 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2984 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2985 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2986 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2988 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2989 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2991 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2992 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2996 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2998 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3000 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3004 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3005 or more arguments between partitions.
3007 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3008 holes in the destination.
3010 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3011 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3012 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3013 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3014 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3015 terminates immediately.
3017 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3019 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3021 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3022 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3023 not the empty string.
3025 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3026 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3030 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3031 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3032 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3035 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3042 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3046 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3047 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3049 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3050 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3052 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3053 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3054 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3057 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3061 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3062 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3064 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3065 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3067 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3068 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3069 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3071 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3073 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3076 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3078 ** Configuration option
3080 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3081 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3085 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3086 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3090 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3091 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3092 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3095 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3096 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3097 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3098 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3099 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3100 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3101 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3104 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3108 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3109 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3110 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3112 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3113 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3115 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3117 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3118 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3119 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3120 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3122 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3124 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3125 not just the ones that reference directories
3127 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3128 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3130 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3131 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3132 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3134 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3135 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3136 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3137 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3138 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3139 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3141 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3146 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3147 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3149 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3151 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3153 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3155 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3156 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3158 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3159 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3161 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3163 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3167 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3169 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3171 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3172 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3173 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3174 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3175 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3177 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3178 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3180 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3181 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3183 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3184 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3186 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3187 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3188 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3192 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3193 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3194 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3195 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3196 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3197 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3198 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3199 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3200 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3201 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3202 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3203 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3204 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3205 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3207 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3209 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3210 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3212 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3214 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3216 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3217 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3219 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3221 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3222 without a trailing newline.
3224 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3225 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3227 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3230 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3234 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3236 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3238 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3239 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3240 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3241 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3243 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3245 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3246 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3247 be printed without leading spaces.
3249 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3250 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3255 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3256 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3257 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3259 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3261 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3262 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3264 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3265 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3267 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3268 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3270 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3272 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3274 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3276 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3277 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3279 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3281 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3283 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3284 byte offsets are specified.
3287 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3290 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3293 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3294 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3295 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3296 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3297 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3298 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3299 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3300 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3301 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3302 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3303 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3304 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3305 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3306 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3307 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3308 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3309 directory where M has write access.
3310 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3311 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3312 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3315 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3316 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3317 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3318 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3319 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3320 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3321 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3322 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3323 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3324 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3325 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3326 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3327 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3328 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3329 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3330 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3331 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3332 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3333 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3334 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3335 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3336 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3337 appeared one additional time.
3339 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3340 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3341 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3342 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3345 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3346 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3347 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3348 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3349 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3350 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3351 if there were more than 338.
3353 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3354 - false --help now exits nonzero
3357 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3358 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3359 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3360 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3363 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3364 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3365 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3366 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3367 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3370 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3371 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3372 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3373 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3374 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3375 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3376 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3379 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3380 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3381 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3382 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3383 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3384 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3386 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3387 under certain unusual conditions
3388 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3389 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3392 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3393 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3394 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3395 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3396 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3397 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3398 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3399 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3400 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3401 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3402 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3403 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3404 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3405 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3406 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3407 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3410 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3411 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3414 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3415 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3416 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3417 involving hard-linked directories
3418 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3419 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3420 character-special and block files
3423 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3424 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3425 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3426 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3427 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3428 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3429 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3430 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3431 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3433 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3434 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3435 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3436 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3437 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3438 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3439 specified on the command line.
3440 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3441 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3442 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3443 the first file untouched.
3444 * readlink: new program
3445 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3446 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3447 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3448 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3449 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3450 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3453 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3454 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3455 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3456 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3457 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3458 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3459 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3460 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3461 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3462 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3463 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3464 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3466 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3467 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3468 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3470 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3471 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3472 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3473 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3474 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3475 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3476 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3477 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3480 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3481 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3484 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3485 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3486 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3487 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3488 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3489 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3490 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3493 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3494 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3496 ========================================================================
3497 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3498 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3501 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3503 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3504 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3505 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3506 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3507 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3508 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3509 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3510 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3511 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3512 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3513 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3514 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3516 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3517 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3518 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3519 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3521 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3524 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3526 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3527 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3528 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3529 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3530 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3531 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3532 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3535 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3536 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3537 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3538 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3539 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3540 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3541 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3542 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3543 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3544 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3545 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3546 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3547 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3548 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3549 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3550 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3552 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3553 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3555 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3556 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3557 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3558 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3559 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3560 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3562 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3563 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3564 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3565 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3566 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3567 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3568 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3570 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3571 the source files in the following example:
3572 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3573 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3574 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3575 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3576 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3577 links between source files with --preserve=links
3578 * cp accepts new options:
3579 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3580 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3581 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3582 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3583 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3584 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3585 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3586 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3587 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3589 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3590 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3591 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3592 even though it's older than dest.
3593 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3594 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3595 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3596 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3597 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3599 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3600 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3601 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3602 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3603 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3604 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3605 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3607 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3608 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3609 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3611 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3612 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3613 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3614 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3615 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3616 This is the default.
3618 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3619 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3620 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3621 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3622 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3624 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3627 ========================================================================
3628 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3629 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3632 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3633 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3635 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3636 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3637 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3638 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3639 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3641 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3642 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3643 that specifies a non-directory
3646 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3647 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3648 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3649 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3650 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3651 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3652 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3653 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3654 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3655 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3656 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3657 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3658 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3659 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3660 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3661 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3662 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3663 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3664 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3665 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3666 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3667 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3668 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3669 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3671 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3672 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3673 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3675 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3677 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3678 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3680 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3681 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3682 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3683 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3684 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3686 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3687 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3688 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3689 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3690 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3692 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3694 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3695 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3696 * still more portability fixes
3697 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3698 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3700 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3702 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3704 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3706 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3707 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3708 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3709 there is any time remaining
3710 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3712 ========================================================================
3713 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3714 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3716 This package began as the union of the following:
3717 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3719 ========================================================================
3721 Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3723 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3724 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3725 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3726 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3727 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3728 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.