1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
8 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
9 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
11 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
12 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
14 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
15 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
17 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
18 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
20 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
21 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
25 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
26 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
27 processed portion thereof.
29 ** Changes in behavior
31 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
32 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
34 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
37 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
41 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
42 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
43 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
44 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
45 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
47 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
48 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
50 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
51 reject file names invalid for that file system.
53 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
54 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
58 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
59 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
60 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
61 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
62 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
63 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
64 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
65 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
67 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
68 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
69 the same number of fields are output for each line.
71 ** Changes in behavior
73 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
74 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
75 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
78 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
82 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
83 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
84 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
87 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
91 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
92 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
94 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
95 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
97 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
98 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
100 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
101 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
102 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
103 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
105 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
106 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
108 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
109 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
110 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
112 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
114 ** Changes in behavior
116 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
117 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
118 to the number of available processors.
122 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
125 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
129 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
130 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
131 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
132 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
134 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
135 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
136 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
138 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
139 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
141 ** Changes in behavior
143 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
144 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
146 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
147 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
148 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
149 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
150 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
151 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
153 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
154 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
155 the same way as the others.
158 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
162 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
163 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
164 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
166 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
167 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
169 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
170 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
171 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
173 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
174 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
176 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
177 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
179 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
180 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
181 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
183 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
184 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
185 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
186 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
190 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
191 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
193 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
196 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
197 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
199 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
201 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
202 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
203 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
205 ** Changes in behavior
207 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
208 rather than its aliased target.
210 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
211 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
212 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
214 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
215 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
216 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
217 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
218 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
219 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
220 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
221 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
223 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
225 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
227 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
228 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
231 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
232 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
233 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
234 control like taskset for example.
236 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
238 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
239 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
240 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
241 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
242 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
243 includes %C when context information is available.
245 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
246 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
247 rather than a file system attribute.
249 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
250 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
251 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
252 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
254 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
255 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
256 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
258 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
259 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
260 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
263 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
267 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
268 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
270 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
272 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
273 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
275 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
276 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
277 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
278 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
280 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
281 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
282 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
286 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
287 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
289 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
290 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
291 duration after the initial signal was sent.
293 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
294 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
295 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
296 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
297 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
298 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
299 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
300 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
301 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
303 ** Changes in behavior
305 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
306 sequence when it would be a no-op.
308 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
309 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
312 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
316 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
317 of available processors, which may not have been the case
318 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
319 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
323 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
324 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
326 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
327 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
328 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
329 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
331 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
332 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
333 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
336 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
340 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
341 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
342 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
344 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
345 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
346 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
348 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
349 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
351 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
352 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
353 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
354 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
356 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
357 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
358 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
360 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
361 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
362 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
363 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
365 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
366 renamed-aside and then recreated.
367 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
369 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
370 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
371 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
372 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
374 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
375 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
376 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
378 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
379 processes will not intersperse their output.
380 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
383 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
387 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
388 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
390 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
391 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
393 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
394 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
395 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
396 the presence of the empty string argument.
397 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
399 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
400 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
401 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
402 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
404 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
405 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
407 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
408 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
409 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
411 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
412 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
413 and with a malicious user on the same system
414 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
415 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
418 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
422 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
423 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
424 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
426 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
427 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
428 offending directory and all "contents."
430 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
431 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
432 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
434 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
435 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
436 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
438 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
439 processes will not intersperse their output.
440 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
441 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
443 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
444 output the name of the file to stdout.
445 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
447 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
448 call fails with errno == EACCES.
449 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
451 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
452 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
455 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
456 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
457 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
459 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
460 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
461 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
462 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
463 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
464 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
466 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
467 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
468 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
469 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
471 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
472 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
474 ** Changes in behavior
476 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
477 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
478 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
479 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
480 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
482 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
483 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
484 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
485 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
487 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
489 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
490 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
491 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
492 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
493 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
497 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
501 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
502 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
504 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
505 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
507 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
508 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
509 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
511 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
512 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
515 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
519 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
520 when the source file doesn't have write access.
521 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
523 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
524 to accommodate leap seconds.
525 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
527 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
528 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
529 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
531 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
533 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
534 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
535 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
537 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
538 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
539 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
540 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
541 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
545 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
546 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
547 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
548 directory or a symlink to a directory.
550 ** Changes in behavior
552 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
553 environment variable is set.
555 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
556 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
557 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
561 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
562 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
563 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
564 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
566 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
567 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
568 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
569 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
573 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
574 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
575 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
577 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
578 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
579 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
580 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
581 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
582 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
585 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
586 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
589 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
593 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
594 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
595 and libraries tested at configure time.
596 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
598 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
599 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
601 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
602 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
604 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
605 printing a summary to stderr.
606 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
608 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
609 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
610 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
612 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
613 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
615 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
616 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
617 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
618 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
620 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
621 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
622 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
623 which is relatively unusual.
624 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
626 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
627 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
628 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
629 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
630 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
631 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
632 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
636 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
637 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
638 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
639 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
640 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
644 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
645 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
647 ** Changes in behavior
649 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
650 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
651 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
652 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
653 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
656 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
660 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
661 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
663 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
664 before data copying has started.
666 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
667 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
669 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
670 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
671 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
672 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
674 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
675 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
676 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
677 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
679 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
684 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
685 for its standard streams.
687 ** Changes in behavior
689 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
690 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
691 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
692 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
693 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
694 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
696 ** Deprecated options
698 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
699 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
703 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
705 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
706 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
709 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
711 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
712 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
714 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
715 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
718 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
722 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
723 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
724 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
725 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
727 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
728 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
729 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
730 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
731 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
736 make check: two tests have been corrected
740 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
741 inherited from gnulib.
744 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
748 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
749 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
750 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
751 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
753 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
754 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
756 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
758 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
759 systems without xattr support.
761 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
762 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
763 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
765 ** Changes in behavior
767 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
768 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
769 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
770 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
772 ** Improved robustness
774 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
775 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
776 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
777 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
778 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
779 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
780 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
781 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
782 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
786 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
787 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
789 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
790 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
791 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
792 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
793 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
796 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
800 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
801 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
802 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
806 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
807 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
808 data was read, or on process exit.
809 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
811 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
812 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
813 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
814 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
816 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
817 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
818 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
819 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
821 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
822 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
824 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
825 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
827 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
828 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
829 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
831 ** Changes in behavior
833 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
834 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
835 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
837 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
838 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
840 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
841 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
842 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
845 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
849 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
851 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
852 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
853 install: Never copies xattrs
855 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
856 from overwriting any existing destination file
858 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
859 mode where this feature is available.
861 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
862 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
863 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
864 do not modify the destination at all.
866 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
868 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
872 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
873 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
875 cp uses much less memory in some situations
877 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
878 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
880 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
881 processing the first file name
883 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
884 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
885 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
886 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
888 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
889 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
891 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
892 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
895 ** Changes in behavior
897 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
898 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
900 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
901 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
902 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
904 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
905 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
907 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
909 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
910 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
911 is still marked with a '+'.
914 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
918 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
919 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
923 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
924 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
925 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
926 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
927 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
928 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
930 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
931 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
933 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
934 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
936 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
938 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
939 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
940 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
942 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
943 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
945 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
946 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
947 used to factor large numbers.
949 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
952 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
954 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
956 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
957 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
959 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
960 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
961 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
962 maximum command-line (argv) length.
964 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
965 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
966 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
968 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
969 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
973 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
975 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
976 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
978 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
979 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
981 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
983 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
984 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
988 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
989 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
990 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
992 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
994 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
995 no matter how many files are in a given directory
997 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
998 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
999 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1001 ** Changes in behavior
1003 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1004 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1007 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1011 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1013 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1014 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1015 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1017 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1018 with no USERNAME argument.
1020 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1021 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1022 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1024 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1025 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1026 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1027 number of fields for some inputs.
1029 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1030 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1032 ** Changes in behavior
1034 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1035 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1038 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1042 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1044 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1045 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1046 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1047 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1049 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1050 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1052 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1053 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1055 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1056 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1058 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1059 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1060 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1061 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1063 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1064 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1065 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1066 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1067 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1068 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1070 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1071 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1073 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1074 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1075 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1077 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1078 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1080 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1081 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1083 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1084 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1085 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1086 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1088 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1089 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1091 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1092 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1094 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1095 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1096 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1100 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1101 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1103 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1104 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1105 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1106 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1110 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1111 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1113 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1115 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1119 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1120 which have negative errno values.
1124 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1128 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1132 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1133 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1136 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1140 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1141 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1142 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1144 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1145 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1146 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1147 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1151 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1152 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1153 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1154 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1157 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1161 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1163 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1164 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1165 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1168 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1172 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1173 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1175 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1177 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1179 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1181 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1185 ** Changes in behavior
1187 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1188 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1190 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1191 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1193 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1194 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1195 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1199 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1200 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1201 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1202 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1203 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1204 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1205 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1206 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1207 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1208 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1209 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1211 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1212 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1213 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1216 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1219 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1220 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1221 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1223 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1224 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1225 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1228 ** New build options
1230 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1231 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1232 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1233 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1235 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1236 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1237 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1238 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1239 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1240 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1241 of "make check" fail.
1243 ** Remove deprecated options
1245 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1246 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1247 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1248 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1249 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1251 ** Improved robustness
1253 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1254 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1255 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1256 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1257 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1258 loss of the contents of a/f.
1260 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1261 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1265 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1266 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1267 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1269 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1270 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1271 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1272 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1274 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1275 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1276 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1277 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1278 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1279 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1280 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1281 destination is a symlink.
1283 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1285 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1286 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1288 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1289 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1291 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1293 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1294 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1296 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1297 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1299 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1302 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1303 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1305 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1306 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1308 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1309 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1310 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1311 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1313 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1314 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1315 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1317 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1318 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1319 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1321 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1322 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1323 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1324 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1326 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1327 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1328 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1330 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1331 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1333 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1334 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1336 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1338 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1339 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1340 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1342 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1343 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1345 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1346 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1348 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1349 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1351 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1352 [present in the original version]
1355 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1359 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1361 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1362 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1363 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1365 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1366 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1368 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1372 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1373 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1375 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1376 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1378 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1379 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1381 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1382 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1383 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1384 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1385 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1386 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1388 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1389 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1392 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1393 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1395 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1398 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1399 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1400 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1402 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1403 directory is unreadable.
1405 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1406 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1407 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1409 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1410 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1411 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1412 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1413 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1416 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1417 Before it would print nothing.
1419 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1421 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1422 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1423 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1424 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1425 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1426 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1427 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1428 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1430 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1434 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1435 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1436 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1438 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1439 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1440 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1441 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1444 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1448 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1449 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1450 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1451 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1452 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1453 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1454 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1456 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1457 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1458 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1459 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1460 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1461 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1462 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1463 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1465 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1466 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1467 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1470 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1474 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1475 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1477 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1478 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1479 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1481 ** Improved robustness
1483 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1484 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1485 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1488 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1492 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1493 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1494 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1495 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1496 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1498 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1502 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1505 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1509 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1510 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1511 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1512 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1514 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1515 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1517 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1518 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1519 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1522 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1524 ** Improved robustness
1526 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1527 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1529 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1530 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1531 or NFS-mounted partition.
1533 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1534 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1538 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1539 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1540 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1541 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1542 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1543 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1545 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1546 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1548 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1549 or neglect to report file removal.
1551 For the "groups" command:
1553 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1554 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1556 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1558 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1560 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1564 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1565 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1568 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1570 ** Changes in behavior
1572 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1573 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1574 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1575 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1577 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1578 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1579 a final `./' or `../' component.
1581 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1582 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1583 this only for pipes.
1585 ** Infrastructure changes
1587 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1588 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1589 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1590 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1594 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1595 name is "." or "..".
1597 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1598 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1599 dirent.d_type support.
1601 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1602 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1604 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1605 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1606 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1607 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1610 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1612 ** Changes in behavior
1614 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1618 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1619 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1623 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1624 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1625 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1627 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1628 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1630 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1631 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1633 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1635 ** Improved robustness
1637 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1638 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1639 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1641 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1642 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1645 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1646 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1648 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1649 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1651 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1652 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1654 ** Changes in behavior
1656 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1657 where the two are distinct.
1659 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1660 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1661 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1662 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1663 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1664 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1665 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1666 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1667 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1668 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1669 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1670 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1671 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1672 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1673 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1674 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1675 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1677 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1678 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1679 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1681 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1682 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1683 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1684 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1687 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1688 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1692 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1693 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1694 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1695 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1697 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1698 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1699 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1701 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1702 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1703 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1704 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1705 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1708 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1709 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1711 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1712 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1713 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1714 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1716 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1717 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1718 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1720 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1721 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1722 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1723 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1725 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1726 and sticky) with the -m option.
1728 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1729 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1730 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1731 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1732 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1734 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1735 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1737 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1741 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1742 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1743 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1744 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1746 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1748 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1750 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1751 silently ignoring one of them.
1753 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1754 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1755 containing this change was 5.92.
1757 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1758 automatically newline terminated.
1760 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1761 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1762 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1763 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1766 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1767 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1768 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1771 ** Scheduled for removal
1773 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1774 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1776 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1777 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1778 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1779 command to unlink a directory.
1781 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1782 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1783 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1784 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1788 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1789 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1790 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1791 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1792 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1793 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1797 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1798 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1800 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1802 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1803 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1804 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1806 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1807 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1810 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1811 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1813 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1814 list directories before files.
1816 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1817 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1818 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1819 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1822 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1824 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1826 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1827 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1828 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1830 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1831 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1835 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1836 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1837 usually printing nothing.
1839 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1841 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1842 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1843 them with hard-linked directories.
1845 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1846 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1847 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1849 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1850 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1851 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1853 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1856 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1857 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1859 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1860 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1862 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1863 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1865 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1866 all command-line arguments.
1868 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1870 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1872 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1873 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1875 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1877 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1878 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1879 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1880 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1881 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1883 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1884 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1886 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1887 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1888 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1889 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1891 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1893 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1897 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1898 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1900 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1901 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1903 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1904 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1906 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1907 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1909 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1910 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1912 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1914 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1915 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1916 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1919 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1921 ** Build-related bug fixes
1923 installing .mo files would fail
1926 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1930 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1932 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1935 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1939 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1940 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1944 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1946 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1947 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1949 ** Deprecated options
1951 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1952 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1954 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1958 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1960 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1961 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1962 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1963 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1965 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1968 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1974 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1979 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1981 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1983 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1984 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1985 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1987 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1988 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1989 problematic usages. These include:
1991 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1992 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1993 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1994 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1995 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1996 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1997 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1998 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1999 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2001 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2002 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2004 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2005 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2006 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2007 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2009 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2010 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2011 between binary and text files.
2013 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2017 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2021 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2022 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2024 head tac tail tee tr
2025 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2027 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2028 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2030 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2031 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2032 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2034 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2036 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2038 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2039 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2040 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2044 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2046 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2047 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2049 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2050 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2051 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2055 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2056 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2060 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2061 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2062 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2066 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2067 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2071 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2073 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2075 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2079 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2080 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2081 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2083 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2084 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2085 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2086 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2087 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2089 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2093 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2094 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2095 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2097 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2099 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2100 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2101 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2102 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2104 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2106 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2107 rather than silently wrapping around.
2109 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2110 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2112 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2113 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2115 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2116 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2117 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2118 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2120 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2122 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2124 ** Improved robustness
2126 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2127 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2128 no matter how large the result.
2130 ** Improved portability
2132 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2133 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2135 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2137 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2138 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2139 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2141 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2142 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2146 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2147 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2149 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2151 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2152 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2153 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2154 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2156 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2157 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2159 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2160 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2161 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2163 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2165 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2166 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2168 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2169 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2171 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2173 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2174 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2176 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2177 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2179 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2180 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2181 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2183 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2185 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2187 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2191 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2193 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2194 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2195 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2197 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2198 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2200 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2201 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2202 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2204 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2205 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2207 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2208 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2209 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2210 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2212 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2213 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2215 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2216 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2217 the file system does not support it.
2219 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2221 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2222 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2224 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2226 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2227 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2229 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2230 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2231 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2232 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2234 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2235 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2238 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2239 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2240 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2241 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2243 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2244 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2245 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2246 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2248 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2249 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2251 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2253 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2254 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2255 reporting incorrect results.
2259 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2260 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2262 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2265 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2267 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2268 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2270 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2271 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2273 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2276 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2277 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2278 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2279 the file name does not look like a page range.
2281 printf has several changes:
2283 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2284 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2286 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2287 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2288 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2290 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2291 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2294 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2295 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2297 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2298 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2300 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2302 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2303 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2305 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2307 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2309 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2310 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2311 when first encountering the directory.
2315 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2316 output; POSIX requires this.
2318 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2319 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2321 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2323 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2324 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2326 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2327 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2329 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2330 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2331 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2332 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2333 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2334 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2335 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2337 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2338 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2339 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2341 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2342 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2344 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2346 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2348 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2349 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2350 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2351 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2353 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2357 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2358 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2359 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2360 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2361 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2363 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2364 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2365 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2367 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2368 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2370 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2371 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2373 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2374 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2375 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2376 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2377 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2379 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2380 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2382 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2383 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2385 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2387 nocreat do not create the output file
2388 excl fail if the output file already exists
2389 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2390 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2392 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2394 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2395 direct use direct I/O for data
2396 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2397 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2398 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2399 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2400 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2402 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2404 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2405 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2408 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2409 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2410 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2411 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2412 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2413 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2415 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2416 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2418 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2421 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2423 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2425 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2426 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2428 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2429 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2430 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2432 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2433 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2434 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2436 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2438 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2439 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2441 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2442 for compatibility with bash.
2444 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2446 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2447 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2448 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2449 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2451 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2452 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2454 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2455 ls supports TABSIZE.
2456 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2457 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2458 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2460 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2463 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2465 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2466 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2467 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2468 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2469 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2470 an offset, not as a file name.
2472 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2473 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2475 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2476 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2478 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2479 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2481 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2482 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2483 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2485 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2486 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2488 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2489 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2493 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2495 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2497 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2501 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2502 or more arguments between partitions.
2504 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2505 holes in the destination.
2507 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2508 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2509 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2510 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2511 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2512 terminates immediately.
2514 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2516 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2518 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2519 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2520 not the empty string.
2522 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2523 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2527 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2528 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2529 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2532 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2539 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2543 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2544 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2546 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2547 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2549 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2550 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2551 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2554 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2558 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2559 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2561 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2562 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2564 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2565 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2566 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2568 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2570 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2573 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2575 ** Configuration option
2577 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2578 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2582 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2583 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2587 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2588 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2589 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2592 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2593 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2594 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2595 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2596 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2597 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2598 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2601 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2605 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2606 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2607 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2609 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2610 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2612 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2614 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2615 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2616 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2617 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2619 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2621 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2622 not just the ones that reference directories
2624 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2625 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2627 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2628 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2629 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2631 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2632 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2633 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2634 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2635 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2636 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2638 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2643 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2644 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2646 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2648 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2650 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2652 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2653 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2655 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2656 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2658 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2660 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2664 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2666 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2668 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2669 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2670 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2671 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2672 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2674 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2675 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2677 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2678 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2680 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2681 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2683 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2684 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2685 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2689 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2690 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2691 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2692 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2693 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2694 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2695 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2696 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2697 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2698 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2699 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2700 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2701 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2702 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2704 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2706 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2707 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2709 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2711 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2713 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2714 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2716 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2718 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2719 without a trailing newline.
2721 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2722 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2724 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2727 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2731 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2733 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2735 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2736 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2737 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2738 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2740 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2742 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2743 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2744 be printed without leading spaces.
2746 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2747 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2752 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2753 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2754 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2756 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2758 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2759 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2761 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2762 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2764 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2765 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2767 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2769 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2771 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2773 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2774 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2776 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2778 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2780 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2781 byte offsets are specified.
2784 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2787 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2790 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2791 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2792 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2793 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2794 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2795 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2796 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2797 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2798 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2799 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2800 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2801 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2802 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2803 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2804 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2805 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2806 directory where M has write access.
2807 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2808 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2809 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2812 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2813 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2814 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2815 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2816 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2817 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2818 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2819 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2820 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2821 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2822 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2823 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2824 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2825 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2826 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2827 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2828 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2829 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2830 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2831 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2832 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2833 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2834 appeared one additional time.
2836 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2837 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2838 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2839 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2842 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2843 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2844 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2845 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2846 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2847 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2848 if there were more than 338.
2850 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2851 - false --help now exits nonzero
2854 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2855 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2856 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2857 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2860 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2861 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2862 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2863 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2864 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2867 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2868 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2869 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2870 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2871 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2872 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2873 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2876 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2877 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2878 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2879 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2880 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2881 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2883 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2884 under certain unusual conditions
2885 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2886 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2889 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2890 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2891 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2892 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2893 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2894 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2895 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2896 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2897 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2898 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2899 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2900 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2901 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2902 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2903 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2904 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2907 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2908 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2911 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2912 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2913 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2914 involving hard-linked directories
2915 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2916 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2917 character-special and block files
2920 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2921 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2922 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2923 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2924 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2925 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2926 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2927 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2928 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2930 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2931 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2932 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2933 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2934 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2935 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2936 specified on the command line.
2937 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2938 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2939 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2940 the first file untouched.
2941 * readlink: new program
2942 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2943 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2944 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2945 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2946 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2947 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2950 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2951 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2952 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2953 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2954 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2955 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2956 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2957 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2958 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2959 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2960 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2961 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2963 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2964 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2965 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2967 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2968 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2969 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2970 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2971 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2972 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2973 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2974 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2977 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2978 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2981 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2982 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2983 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2984 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2985 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2986 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2987 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2990 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2991 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2993 ========================================================================
2994 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2995 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2998 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3000 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3001 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3002 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3003 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3004 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3005 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3006 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3007 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3008 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3009 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3010 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3011 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3013 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3014 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3015 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3016 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3018 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3021 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3023 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3024 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3025 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3026 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3027 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3028 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3029 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3032 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3033 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3034 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3035 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3036 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3037 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3038 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3039 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3040 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3041 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3042 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3043 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3044 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3045 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3046 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3047 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3049 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3050 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3052 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3053 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3054 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3055 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3056 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3057 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3059 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3060 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3061 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3062 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3063 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3064 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3065 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3067 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3068 the source files in the following example:
3069 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3070 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3071 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3072 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3073 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3074 links between source files with --preserve=links
3075 * cp accepts new options:
3076 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3077 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3078 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3079 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3080 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3081 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3082 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3083 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3084 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3086 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3087 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3088 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3089 even though it's older than dest.
3090 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3091 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3092 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3093 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3094 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3096 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3097 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3098 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3099 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3100 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3101 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3102 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3104 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3105 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3106 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3108 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3109 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3110 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3111 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3112 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3113 This is the default.
3115 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3116 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3117 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3118 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3119 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3121 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3124 ========================================================================
3125 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3126 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3129 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3130 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3132 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3133 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3134 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3135 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3136 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3138 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3139 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3140 that specifies a non-directory
3143 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3144 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3145 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3146 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3147 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3148 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3149 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3150 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3151 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3152 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3153 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3154 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3155 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3156 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3157 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3158 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3159 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3160 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3161 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3162 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3163 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3164 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3165 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3166 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3168 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3169 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3170 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3172 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3174 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3175 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3177 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3178 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3179 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3180 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3181 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3183 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3184 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3185 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3186 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3187 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3189 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3191 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3192 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3193 * still more portability fixes
3194 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3195 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3197 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3199 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3201 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3203 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3204 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3205 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3206 there is any time remaining
3207 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3209 ========================================================================
3210 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3211 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3213 This package began as the union of the following:
3214 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3216 ========================================================================
3218 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3220 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3221 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3222 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3223 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3224 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3225 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.