1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
8 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
9 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
10 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
11 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
12 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
14 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
15 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
16 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
17 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
18 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
19 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
20 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
22 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
23 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
25 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
26 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
30 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
31 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
33 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
35 ** Changes in behavior
37 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
38 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
39 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
41 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
42 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
45 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
49 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
50 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
51 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
52 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
53 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
54 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
55 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
56 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
58 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
59 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
60 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
61 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
62 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
64 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
65 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
67 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
68 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
70 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
71 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
73 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
74 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
76 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
77 additional static suffix to output file names.
79 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
80 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
81 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
83 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
84 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
88 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
89 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
90 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
92 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
93 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
94 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
95 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
96 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
97 typically still point to one of the hard links.
99 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
100 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
101 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
102 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
103 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
105 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
106 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
107 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
108 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
112 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
113 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
114 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
116 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
117 instead of causing a usage failure.
119 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
122 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
126 realpath: print resolved file names.
130 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
131 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
133 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
134 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
136 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
137 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
138 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
139 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
140 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
141 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
143 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
144 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
145 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
147 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
148 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
149 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
151 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
152 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
153 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
154 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
155 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
157 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
159 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
160 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
162 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
163 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
164 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
166 ** Changes in behavior
168 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
169 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
170 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
171 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
172 usually-short referent instead.
174 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
175 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
176 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
177 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
180 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
184 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
185 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
186 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
188 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
189 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
191 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
192 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
196 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
197 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
199 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
200 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
201 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
202 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
204 ** Changes in behavior
206 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
207 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
208 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
212 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
213 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
214 only .tar.xz files is enough.
217 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
221 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
222 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
223 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
225 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
226 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
228 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
229 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
230 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
231 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
232 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
234 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
235 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
236 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
237 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
238 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
239 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
240 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
241 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
243 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
244 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
246 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
247 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
249 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
250 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
252 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
253 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
254 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
256 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
257 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
258 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
259 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
261 ** Changes in behavior
263 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
264 when -v or -c specified.
266 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
267 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
271 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
272 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
273 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
274 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
275 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
277 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
278 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
279 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
281 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
282 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
283 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
284 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
285 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
286 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
287 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
289 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
290 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
291 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
295 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
296 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
298 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
301 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
302 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
304 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
305 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
307 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
308 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
310 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
312 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
316 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
317 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
319 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
322 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
326 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
327 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
329 ** Changes in behavior
331 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
332 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
333 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
334 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
335 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
336 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
338 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
339 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
340 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
344 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
347 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
351 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
352 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
353 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
355 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
356 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
357 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
359 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
360 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
361 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
363 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
364 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
366 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
367 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
369 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
370 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
372 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
373 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
377 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
378 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
379 processed portion thereof.
381 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
382 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
384 ** Changes in behavior
386 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
387 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
388 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
390 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
391 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
392 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
394 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
395 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
397 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
398 Use --preserve-context instead.
400 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
403 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
407 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
408 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
409 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
410 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
411 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
413 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
414 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
416 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
417 reject file names invalid for that file system.
419 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
420 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
424 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
425 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
426 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
427 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
428 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
429 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
430 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
431 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
433 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
434 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
435 the same number of fields are output for each line.
437 ** Changes in behavior
439 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
440 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
441 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
444 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
448 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
449 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
450 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
453 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
457 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
458 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
460 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
461 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
463 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
464 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
466 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
467 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
468 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
469 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
471 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
472 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
474 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
475 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
476 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
478 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
480 ** Changes in behavior
482 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
483 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
484 to the number of available processors.
488 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
491 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
495 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
496 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
497 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
498 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
500 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
501 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
502 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
504 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
505 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
507 ** Changes in behavior
509 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
510 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
512 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
513 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
514 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
515 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
516 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
517 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
519 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
520 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
521 the same way as the others.
524 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
528 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
529 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
530 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
532 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
533 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
535 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
536 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
537 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
539 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
540 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
542 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
543 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
545 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
546 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
547 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
549 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
550 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
551 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
552 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
556 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
557 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
559 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
562 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
563 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
565 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
567 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
568 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
569 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
571 ** Changes in behavior
573 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
574 rather than its aliased target.
576 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
577 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
578 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
580 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
581 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
582 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
583 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
584 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
585 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
586 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
587 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
589 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
591 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
593 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
594 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
597 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
598 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
599 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
600 control like taskset for example.
602 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
604 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
605 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
606 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
607 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
608 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
609 includes %C when context information is available.
611 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
612 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
613 rather than a file system attribute.
615 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
616 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
617 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
618 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
620 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
621 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
622 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
624 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
625 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
626 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
629 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
633 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
634 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
636 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
638 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
639 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
641 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
642 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
643 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
644 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
646 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
647 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
648 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
652 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
653 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
655 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
656 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
657 duration after the initial signal was sent.
659 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
660 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
661 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
662 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
663 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
664 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
665 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
666 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
667 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
669 ** Changes in behavior
671 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
672 sequence when it would be a no-op.
674 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
675 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
678 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
682 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
683 of available processors, which may not have been the case
684 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
685 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
689 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
690 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
692 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
693 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
694 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
695 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
697 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
698 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
699 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
702 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
706 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
707 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
708 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
710 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
711 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
712 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
714 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
715 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
717 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
718 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
719 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
720 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
722 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
723 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
724 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
726 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
727 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
728 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
729 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
731 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
732 renamed-aside and then recreated.
733 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
735 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
736 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
737 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
738 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
740 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
741 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
742 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
744 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
745 processes will not intersperse their output.
746 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
749 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
753 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
754 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
756 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
757 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
759 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
760 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
761 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
762 the presence of the empty string argument.
763 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
765 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
766 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
767 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
768 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
770 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
771 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
773 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
774 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
775 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
777 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
778 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
779 and with a malicious user on the same system
780 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
781 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
784 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
788 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
789 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
790 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
792 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
793 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
794 offending directory and all "contents."
796 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
797 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
798 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
800 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
801 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
802 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
804 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
805 processes will not intersperse their output.
806 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
807 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
809 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
810 output the name of the file to stdout.
811 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
813 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
814 call fails with errno == EACCES.
815 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
817 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
818 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
821 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
822 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
823 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
825 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
826 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
827 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
828 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
829 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
830 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
832 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
833 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
834 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
835 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
837 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
838 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
840 ** Changes in behavior
842 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
843 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
844 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
845 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
846 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
848 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
849 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
850 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
851 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
853 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
855 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
856 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
857 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
858 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
859 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
863 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
867 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
868 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
870 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
871 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
873 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
874 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
875 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
877 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
878 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
881 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
885 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
886 when the source file doesn't have write access.
887 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
889 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
890 to accommodate leap seconds.
891 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
893 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
894 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
895 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
897 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
899 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
900 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
901 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
903 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
904 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
905 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
906 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
907 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
911 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
912 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
913 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
914 directory or a symlink to a directory.
916 ** Changes in behavior
918 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
919 environment variable is set.
921 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
922 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
923 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
927 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
928 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
929 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
930 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
932 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
933 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
934 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
935 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
939 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
940 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
941 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
943 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
944 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
945 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
946 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
947 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
948 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
951 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
952 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
955 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
959 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
960 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
961 and libraries tested at configure time.
962 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
964 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
965 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
967 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
968 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
970 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
971 printing a summary to stderr.
972 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
974 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
975 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
976 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
978 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
979 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
981 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
982 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
983 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
984 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
986 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
987 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
988 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
989 which is relatively unusual.
990 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
992 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
993 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
994 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
995 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
996 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
997 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
998 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1002 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1003 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1004 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1005 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1006 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1010 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1011 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1013 ** Changes in behavior
1015 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1016 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1017 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1018 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1019 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1022 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1026 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1027 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1029 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1030 before data copying has started.
1032 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1033 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1035 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1036 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1037 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1038 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1040 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1041 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1042 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1043 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1045 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1050 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1051 for its standard streams.
1053 ** Changes in behavior
1055 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1056 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1057 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1058 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1059 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1060 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1062 ** Deprecated options
1064 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1065 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1069 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1071 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1072 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1073 a btrfs file system.
1075 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1077 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1078 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1080 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1081 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1084 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1088 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1089 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1090 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1091 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1093 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1094 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1095 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1096 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1097 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1102 make check: two tests have been corrected
1106 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1107 inherited from gnulib.
1110 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1114 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1115 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1116 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1117 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1119 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1120 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1122 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1124 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1125 systems without xattr support.
1127 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1128 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1129 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1131 ** Changes in behavior
1133 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1134 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1135 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1136 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1138 ** Improved robustness
1140 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1141 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1142 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1143 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1144 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1145 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1146 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1147 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1148 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1152 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1153 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1155 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1156 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1157 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1158 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1159 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1162 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1166 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1167 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1168 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1172 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1173 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1174 data was read, or on process exit.
1175 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1177 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1178 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1179 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1180 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1182 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1183 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1184 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1185 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1187 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1188 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1190 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1191 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1193 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1194 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1195 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1197 ** Changes in behavior
1199 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1200 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1201 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1203 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1204 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1206 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1207 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1208 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1211 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1215 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1217 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1218 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1219 install: Never copies xattrs
1221 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1222 from overwriting any existing destination file
1224 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1225 mode where this feature is available.
1227 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1228 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1229 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1230 do not modify the destination at all.
1232 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1234 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1238 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1239 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1241 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1243 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1244 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1246 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1247 processing the first file name
1249 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1250 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1251 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1252 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1254 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1255 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1257 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1258 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1261 ** Changes in behavior
1263 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1264 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1266 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1267 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1268 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1270 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1271 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1273 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1275 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1276 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1277 is still marked with a '+'.
1280 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1284 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1285 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1289 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1290 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1291 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1292 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1293 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1294 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1296 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1297 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1299 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1300 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1302 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1304 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1305 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1306 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1308 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1309 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1311 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1312 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1313 used to factor large numbers.
1315 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1318 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1320 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1322 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1323 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1325 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1326 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1327 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1328 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1330 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1331 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1332 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1334 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1335 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1339 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1341 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1342 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1344 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1345 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1347 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1349 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1350 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1354 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1355 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1356 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1358 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1360 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1361 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1362 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1364 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1365 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1366 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1368 ** Changes in behavior
1370 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1371 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1374 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1378 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1379 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1380 'futimens' system calls.
1384 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1386 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1387 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1388 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1390 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1391 with no USERNAME argument.
1393 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1394 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1395 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1397 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1398 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1399 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1400 number of fields for some inputs.
1402 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1403 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1405 ** Changes in behavior
1407 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1408 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1411 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1415 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1417 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1418 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1419 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1420 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1422 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1423 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1425 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1426 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1428 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1429 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1431 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1432 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1433 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1434 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1436 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1437 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1438 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1439 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1440 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1441 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1443 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1444 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1446 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1447 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1448 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1450 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1451 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1453 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1454 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1456 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1457 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1458 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1459 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1461 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1462 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1464 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1465 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1467 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1468 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1469 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1473 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1474 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1476 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1477 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1478 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1479 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1483 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1484 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1486 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1488 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1492 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1493 which have negative errno values.
1497 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1501 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1505 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1506 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1509 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1513 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1514 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1515 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1517 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1518 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1519 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1520 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1524 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1525 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1526 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1527 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1530 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1534 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1536 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1537 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1538 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1541 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1545 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1546 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1548 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1550 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1552 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1554 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1558 ** Changes in behavior
1560 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1561 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1563 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1564 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1566 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1567 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1568 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1572 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1573 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1574 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1575 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1576 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1577 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1578 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1579 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1580 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1581 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1582 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1584 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1585 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1586 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1589 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1592 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1593 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1594 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1596 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1597 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1598 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1601 ** New build options
1603 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1604 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1605 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1606 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1608 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1609 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1610 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1611 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1612 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1613 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1614 of "make check" fail.
1616 ** Remove deprecated options
1618 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1619 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1620 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1621 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1622 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1624 ** Improved robustness
1626 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1627 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1628 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1629 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1630 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1631 loss of the contents of a/f.
1633 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1634 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1638 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1639 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1640 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1642 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1643 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1644 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1645 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1647 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1648 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1649 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1650 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1651 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1652 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1653 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1654 destination is a symlink.
1656 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1658 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1659 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1661 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1662 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1664 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1666 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1667 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1669 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1670 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1672 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1675 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1676 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1678 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1679 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1681 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1682 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1683 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1684 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1686 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1687 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1688 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1690 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1691 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1692 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1694 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1695 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1696 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1697 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1699 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1700 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1701 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1703 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1704 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1706 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1707 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1709 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1711 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1712 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1713 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1715 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1716 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1718 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1719 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1721 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1722 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1724 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1725 [present in the original version]
1728 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1732 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1734 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1735 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1736 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1738 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1739 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1741 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1745 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1746 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1748 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1749 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1751 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1752 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1754 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1755 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1756 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1757 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1758 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1759 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1761 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1762 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1765 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1766 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1768 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1771 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1772 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1773 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1775 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1776 directory is unreadable.
1778 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1779 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1780 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1782 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1783 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1784 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1785 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1786 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1789 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1790 Before it would print nothing.
1792 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1794 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1795 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1796 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1797 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1798 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1799 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1800 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1801 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1803 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1807 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1808 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1809 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1811 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1812 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1813 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1814 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1817 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1821 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1822 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1823 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1824 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1825 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1826 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1827 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1829 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1830 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1831 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1832 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1833 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1834 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1835 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1836 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1838 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1839 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1840 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1843 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1847 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1848 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1850 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1851 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1852 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1854 ** Improved robustness
1856 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1857 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1858 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1861 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1865 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1866 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1867 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1868 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1869 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1871 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1875 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1878 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1882 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1883 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1884 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1885 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1887 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1888 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1890 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1891 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1892 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1895 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1897 ** Improved robustness
1899 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1900 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1902 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1903 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1904 or NFS-mounted partition.
1906 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1907 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1911 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1912 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1913 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1914 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1915 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1916 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1918 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1919 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1921 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1922 or neglect to report file removal.
1924 For the "groups" command:
1926 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1927 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1929 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1931 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1933 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1937 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1938 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1941 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1943 ** Changes in behavior
1945 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1946 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1947 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1948 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1950 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
1951 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1952 a final './' or '../' component.
1954 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1955 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1956 this only for pipes.
1958 ** Infrastructure changes
1960 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1961 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1962 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1963 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1967 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1968 name is "." or "..".
1970 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1971 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1972 dirent.d_type support.
1974 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1975 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1977 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1978 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1979 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1980 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1983 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1985 ** Changes in behavior
1987 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1991 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1992 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1996 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1997 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1998 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2000 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2001 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2003 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2004 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2006 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2008 ** Improved robustness
2010 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2011 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2012 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2014 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2015 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2018 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2019 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2021 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2022 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2024 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2025 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2027 ** Changes in behavior
2029 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2030 where the two are distinct.
2032 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2033 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2034 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2035 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2036 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2037 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2038 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2039 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2040 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2041 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2042 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2043 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2044 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2045 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2046 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2047 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2048 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2050 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2051 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2052 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2054 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2055 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2056 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2057 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2060 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2061 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2065 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2066 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2067 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2068 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2070 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2071 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2072 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2074 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2075 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2076 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2077 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2078 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2081 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2082 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2084 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2085 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2086 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2087 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2089 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2090 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2091 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2093 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2094 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2095 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2096 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2098 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2099 and sticky) with the -m option.
2101 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2102 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2103 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2104 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2105 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2107 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2108 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2110 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2114 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2115 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2116 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2117 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2119 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2121 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2123 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2124 silently ignoring one of them.
2126 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2127 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2128 containing this change was 5.92.
2130 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2131 automatically newline terminated.
2133 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2134 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2135 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2136 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2139 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2140 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2141 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2144 ** Scheduled for removal
2146 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2147 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2149 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2150 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2151 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2152 command to unlink a directory.
2154 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2155 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2156 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2157 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2161 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2162 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2163 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2164 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2165 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2166 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2170 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2171 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2173 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2175 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2176 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2177 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2179 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2180 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2183 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2184 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2186 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2187 list directories before files.
2189 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2190 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2191 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2192 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2195 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2197 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2199 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2200 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2201 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2203 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2204 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2208 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2209 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2210 usually printing nothing.
2212 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2214 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2215 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2216 them with hard-linked directories.
2218 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2219 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2220 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2222 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2223 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2224 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2226 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2229 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2230 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2232 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2233 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2235 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2236 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2238 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2239 all command-line arguments.
2241 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2243 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2245 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2246 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2248 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2250 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2251 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2252 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2253 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2254 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2256 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2257 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2259 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2260 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2261 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2262 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2264 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2266 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2270 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2271 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2273 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2274 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2276 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2277 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2279 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2280 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2282 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2283 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2285 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2287 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2288 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2289 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2292 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2294 ** Build-related bug fixes
2296 installing .mo files would fail
2299 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2303 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2305 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2308 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2312 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2313 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2317 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2319 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2320 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2322 ** Deprecated options
2324 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2325 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2327 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2331 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2333 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2334 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2335 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2336 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2338 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2341 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2347 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2352 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2354 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2356 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2357 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2358 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2360 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2361 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2362 problematic usages. These include:
2364 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2365 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2366 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2367 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2368 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2369 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2370 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2371 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2372 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2374 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2375 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2377 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2378 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2379 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2380 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2382 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2383 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2384 between binary and text files.
2386 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2390 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2394 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2395 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2397 head tac tail tee tr
2398 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2400 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2401 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2403 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2404 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2405 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2407 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2409 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2411 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2412 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2413 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2417 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2419 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2420 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2422 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2423 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2424 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2428 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2429 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2433 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2434 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2435 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2439 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2440 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2444 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2446 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2448 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2452 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2453 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2454 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2456 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2457 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2458 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2459 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2460 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2462 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2466 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2467 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2468 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2470 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2472 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2473 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2474 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2475 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2477 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2479 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2480 rather than silently wrapping around.
2482 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2483 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2485 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2486 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2488 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2489 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2490 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2491 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2493 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2495 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2497 ** Improved robustness
2499 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2500 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2501 no matter how large the result.
2503 ** Improved portability
2505 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2506 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2508 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2510 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2511 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2512 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2514 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2515 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2519 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2520 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2522 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2524 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2525 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2526 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2527 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2529 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2530 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2532 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2533 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2534 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2536 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2538 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2539 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2541 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2542 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2544 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2546 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2547 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2549 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2550 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2552 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2553 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2554 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2556 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2558 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2560 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2564 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2566 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2567 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2568 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2570 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2571 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2573 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2574 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2575 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2577 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2578 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2580 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2581 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2582 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2583 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2585 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2586 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2588 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2589 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2590 the file system does not support it.
2592 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2594 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2595 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2597 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2599 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2600 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2602 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2603 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2604 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2605 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2607 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2608 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2611 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2612 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2613 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2614 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2616 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2617 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2618 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2619 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2621 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2622 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2624 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2626 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2627 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2628 reporting incorrect results.
2632 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2633 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2635 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2638 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2640 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2641 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2643 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2644 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2646 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2649 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2650 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2651 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2652 the file name does not look like a page range.
2654 printf has several changes:
2656 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2657 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2659 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2660 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2661 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2663 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2664 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2667 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2668 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2670 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2671 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2673 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2675 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2676 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2678 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2680 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2682 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2683 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2684 when first encountering the directory.
2688 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2689 output; POSIX requires this.
2691 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2692 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2694 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2696 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2697 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2699 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2700 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2702 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2703 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2704 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2705 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2706 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2707 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2708 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2710 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2711 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2712 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2714 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2715 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2717 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2719 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2721 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2722 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2723 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2724 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2726 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2730 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2731 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2732 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2733 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
2734 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
2736 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2737 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2738 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2740 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2741 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2743 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2744 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2746 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2747 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2748 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2749 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2750 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2752 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2753 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2755 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2756 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2758 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2760 nocreat do not create the output file
2761 excl fail if the output file already exists
2762 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2763 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2765 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2767 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2768 direct use direct I/O for data
2769 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2770 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2771 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2772 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2773 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2775 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2777 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2778 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
2781 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2782 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2783 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2784 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2785 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2786 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2788 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2789 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2791 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2794 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2796 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2798 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2799 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2801 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2802 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2803 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2805 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2806 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2807 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2809 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2811 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2812 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2814 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2815 for compatibility with bash.
2817 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2819 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2820 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2821 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2822 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2824 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2825 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2827 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2828 ls supports TABSIZE.
2829 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2830 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2831 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2833 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2836 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2838 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2839 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2840 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2841 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2842 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2843 an offset, not as a file name.
2845 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2846 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2848 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2849 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2851 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2852 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2854 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2855 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2856 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2858 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2859 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2861 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2862 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2866 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2868 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2870 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2874 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2875 or more arguments between partitions.
2877 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2878 holes in the destination.
2880 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2881 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2882 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2883 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2884 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2885 terminates immediately.
2887 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2889 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2891 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2892 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2893 not the empty string.
2895 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2896 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2900 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2901 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2902 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
2905 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2912 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2916 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2917 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
2919 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2920 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2922 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2923 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2924 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2927 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2931 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2932 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2934 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2935 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2937 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2938 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2939 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2941 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2943 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2946 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2948 ** Configuration option
2950 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2951 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2955 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2956 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2960 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2961 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2962 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2965 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2966 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2967 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2968 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2969 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2970 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2971 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2974 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2978 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2979 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2980 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2982 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2983 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2985 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2987 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2988 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2989 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2990 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2992 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2994 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2995 not just the ones that reference directories
2997 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2998 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3000 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3001 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3002 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3004 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3005 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3006 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3007 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3008 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3009 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3011 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3016 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3017 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3019 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3021 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3023 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3025 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3026 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3028 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3029 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3031 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3033 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3037 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3039 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3041 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3042 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3043 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3044 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3045 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3047 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3048 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3050 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3051 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3053 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3054 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3056 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3057 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3058 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3062 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3063 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3064 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3065 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3066 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3067 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3068 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3069 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3070 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3071 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3072 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3073 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3074 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3075 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3077 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3079 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3080 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3082 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3084 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3086 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3087 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3089 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3091 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3092 without a trailing newline.
3094 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3095 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3097 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3100 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3104 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3106 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3108 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3109 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3110 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3111 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3113 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3115 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3116 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3117 be printed without leading spaces.
3119 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3120 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3125 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3126 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3127 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3129 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3131 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3132 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3134 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3135 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3137 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3138 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3140 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3142 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3144 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3146 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3147 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3149 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3151 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3153 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3154 byte offsets are specified.
3157 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3160 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3163 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3164 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3165 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3166 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3167 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3168 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3169 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3170 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3171 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3172 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3173 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3174 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3175 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3176 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3177 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3178 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3179 directory where M has write access.
3180 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3181 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3182 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3185 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3186 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3187 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3188 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3189 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3190 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3191 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3192 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3193 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3194 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3195 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3196 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3197 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3198 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3199 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3200 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3201 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3202 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3203 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3204 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3205 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3206 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3207 appeared one additional time.
3209 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3210 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3211 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3212 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3215 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3216 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3217 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3218 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3219 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3220 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3221 if there were more than 338.
3223 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3224 - false --help now exits nonzero
3227 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3228 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3229 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3230 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3233 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3234 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3235 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3236 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3237 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3240 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3241 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3242 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3243 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3244 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3245 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3246 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3249 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3250 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3251 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3252 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3253 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3254 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3256 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3257 under certain unusual conditions
3258 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3259 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3262 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3263 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3264 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3265 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3266 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3267 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3268 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3269 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3270 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3271 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3272 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3273 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3274 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3275 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3276 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3277 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3280 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3281 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3284 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3285 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3286 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3287 involving hard-linked directories
3288 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3289 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3290 character-special and block files
3293 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3294 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3295 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3296 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3297 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3298 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3299 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3300 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3301 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3303 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3304 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3305 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3306 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3307 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3308 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3309 specified on the command line.
3310 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3311 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3312 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3313 the first file untouched.
3314 * readlink: new program
3315 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3316 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3317 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3318 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3319 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3320 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3323 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3324 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3325 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3326 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3327 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3328 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3329 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3330 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3331 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3332 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3333 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3334 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3336 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3337 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3338 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3340 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3341 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3342 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3343 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3344 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3345 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3346 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3347 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3350 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3351 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3354 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3355 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3356 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3357 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3358 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3359 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3360 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3363 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3364 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3366 ========================================================================
3367 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3368 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3371 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3373 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3374 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3375 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3376 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3377 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3378 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3379 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3380 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3381 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3382 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3383 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3384 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3386 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3387 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3388 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3389 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3391 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3394 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3396 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3397 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3398 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3399 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3400 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3401 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3402 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3405 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3406 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3407 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3408 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3409 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3410 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3411 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3412 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3413 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3414 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3415 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3416 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3417 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3418 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3419 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3420 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3422 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3423 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3425 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3426 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3427 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3428 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3429 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3430 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3432 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3433 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3434 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3435 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3436 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3437 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3438 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3440 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3441 the source files in the following example:
3442 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3443 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3444 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3445 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3446 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3447 links between source files with --preserve=links
3448 * cp accepts new options:
3449 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3450 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3451 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3452 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3453 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3454 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3455 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3456 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3457 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3459 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3460 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3461 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3462 even though it's older than dest.
3463 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3464 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3465 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3466 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3467 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3469 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3470 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3471 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3472 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3473 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3474 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3475 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3477 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3478 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3479 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3481 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3482 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3483 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3484 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3485 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3486 This is the default.
3488 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3489 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3490 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3491 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3492 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3494 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3497 ========================================================================
3498 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3499 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3502 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3503 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3505 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3506 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3507 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3508 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3509 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3511 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3512 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3513 that specifies a non-directory
3516 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3517 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3518 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3519 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3520 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3521 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3522 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3523 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3524 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3525 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3526 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3527 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3528 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3529 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3530 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3531 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3532 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3533 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3534 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3535 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3536 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3537 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3538 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3539 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3541 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3542 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3543 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3545 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3547 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3548 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3550 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3551 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3552 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3553 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3554 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3556 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3557 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3558 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3559 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3560 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3562 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3564 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3565 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3566 * still more portability fixes
3567 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3568 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3570 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3572 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3574 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3576 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3577 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3578 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3579 there is any time remaining
3580 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3582 ========================================================================
3583 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3584 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3586 This package began as the union of the following:
3587 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3589 ========================================================================
3591 Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3593 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3594 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3595 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3596 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3597 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3598 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.