1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
5 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
8 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
12 numfmt: reformat numbers
16 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
17 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with -Z set the SMACK context where available.
19 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
20 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
21 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
23 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
24 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
25 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
29 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
30 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
32 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
33 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
34 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
36 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
37 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
38 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
40 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
41 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
42 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
44 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
45 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
46 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
48 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
49 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
50 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
52 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
53 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
55 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
56 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
58 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
59 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
60 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
62 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
63 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
64 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
66 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
67 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
68 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
70 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
71 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
72 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
73 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
75 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
76 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
77 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
79 ** Changes in behavior
81 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
82 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
83 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
84 'total' in the target column.
86 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
87 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
88 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
90 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
91 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
95 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
96 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
98 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
99 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
101 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
105 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
106 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
107 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
108 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
109 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
110 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
111 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
112 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
113 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
114 for a patched distribution package.
116 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
117 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
119 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
120 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
121 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
122 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
125 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
129 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
131 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
132 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
133 sha384sum and sha512sum.
137 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
138 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
139 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
140 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
141 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
143 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
144 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
146 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
147 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
148 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
149 eventually exits nonzero.
151 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
152 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
153 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
154 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
155 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
157 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
158 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
159 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
161 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
162 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
163 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
165 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
166 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
167 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
169 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
170 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
171 Before, this would infloop:
172 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
173 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
175 ** Changes in behavior
177 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
181 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
182 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
183 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
184 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
185 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
188 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
189 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
190 format-changing options.
192 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
193 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
194 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
195 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
196 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
200 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
201 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
202 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
203 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
204 are run without following the instructions in README.
206 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
207 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
208 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
209 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
210 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
211 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
212 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
215 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
219 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
220 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
221 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
222 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
224 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
225 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
226 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
227 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
229 sort -u could read freed memory.
230 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
231 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
232 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
236 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
237 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
238 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
239 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
242 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
246 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
247 processes will not intersperse their output.
248 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
250 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
251 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
252 date: invalid date '\260'
253 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
255 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
256 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
257 lines output by df, can work reliably.
258 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
260 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
261 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
262 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
264 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
265 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
266 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
267 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
268 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
269 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
271 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
272 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
274 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
275 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
277 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
278 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
279 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
281 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
282 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
283 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
287 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
289 ** Changes in behavior
291 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
292 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
293 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
294 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
295 have any reason to include it here.
299 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
300 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
301 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
303 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
304 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
305 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
308 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
312 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
313 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
314 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
315 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
316 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
317 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
319 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
320 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
321 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
322 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
323 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
324 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
325 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
327 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
328 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
330 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
331 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
335 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
336 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
338 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
340 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
342 ** Changes in behavior
344 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
345 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
346 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
348 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
349 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
352 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
356 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
357 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
358 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
359 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
360 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
361 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
362 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
363 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
365 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
366 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
367 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
368 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
369 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
371 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
372 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
374 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
375 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
377 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
378 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
380 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
381 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
383 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
384 additional static suffix to output file names.
386 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
387 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
388 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
390 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
391 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
395 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
396 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
397 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
399 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
400 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
401 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
402 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
403 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
404 typically still point to one of the hard links.
406 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
407 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
408 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
409 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
410 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
412 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
413 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
414 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
415 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
419 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
420 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
421 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
423 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
424 instead of causing a usage failure.
426 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
429 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
433 realpath: print resolved file names.
437 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
438 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
440 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
441 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
443 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
444 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
445 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
446 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
447 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
448 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
450 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
451 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
452 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
454 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
455 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
456 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
458 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
459 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
460 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
461 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
462 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
464 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
466 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
467 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
469 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
470 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
471 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
473 ** Changes in behavior
475 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
476 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
477 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
478 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
479 usually-short referent instead.
481 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
482 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
483 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
484 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
487 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
491 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
492 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
493 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
495 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
496 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
498 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
499 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
503 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
504 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
506 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
507 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
508 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
509 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
511 ** Changes in behavior
513 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
514 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
515 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
519 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
520 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
521 only .tar.xz files is enough.
524 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
528 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
529 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
530 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
532 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
533 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
535 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
536 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
537 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
538 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
539 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
541 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
542 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
543 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
544 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
545 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
546 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
547 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
548 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
550 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
551 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
553 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
554 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
556 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
557 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
559 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
560 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
561 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
563 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
564 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
565 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
566 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
568 ** Changes in behavior
570 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
571 when -v or -c specified.
573 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
574 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
578 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
579 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
580 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
581 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
582 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
584 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
585 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
586 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
588 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
589 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
590 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
591 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
592 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
593 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
594 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
596 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
597 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
598 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
602 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
603 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
605 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
608 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
609 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
611 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
612 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
614 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
615 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
617 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
619 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
623 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
624 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
626 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
629 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
633 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
634 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
636 ** Changes in behavior
638 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
639 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
640 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
641 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
642 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
643 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
645 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
646 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
647 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
651 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
654 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
658 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
659 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
660 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
662 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
663 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
664 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
666 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
667 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
668 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
670 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
671 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
673 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
674 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
676 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
677 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
679 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
680 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
684 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
685 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
686 processed portion thereof.
688 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
689 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
691 ** Changes in behavior
693 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
694 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
695 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
697 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
698 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
699 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
701 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
702 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
704 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
705 Use --preserve-context instead.
707 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
710 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
714 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
715 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
716 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
717 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
718 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
720 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
721 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
723 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
724 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
725 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
727 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
728 reject file names invalid for that file system.
730 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
731 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
735 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
736 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
737 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
738 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
739 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
740 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
741 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
742 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
744 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
745 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
746 the same number of fields are output for each line.
748 ** Changes in behavior
750 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
751 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
752 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
755 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
759 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
760 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
761 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
764 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
768 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
769 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
771 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
772 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
774 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
775 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
777 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
778 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
779 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
780 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
782 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
783 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
785 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
786 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
787 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
789 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
791 ** Changes in behavior
793 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
794 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
795 to the number of available processors.
799 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
802 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
806 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
807 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
808 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
809 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
811 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
812 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
813 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
815 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
816 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
818 ** Changes in behavior
820 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
821 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
823 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
824 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
825 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
826 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
827 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
828 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
830 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
831 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
832 the same way as the others.
835 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
839 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
840 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
841 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
843 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
844 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
846 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
847 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
848 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
850 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
851 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
853 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
854 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
856 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
857 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
858 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
860 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
861 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
862 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
863 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
867 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
868 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
870 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
873 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
874 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
876 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
878 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
879 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
880 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
882 ** Changes in behavior
884 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
885 rather than its aliased target.
887 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
888 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
889 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
891 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
892 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
893 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
894 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
895 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
896 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
897 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
898 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
900 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
902 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
904 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
905 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
908 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
909 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
910 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
911 control like taskset for example.
913 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
915 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
916 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
917 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
918 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
919 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
920 includes %C when context information is available.
922 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
923 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
924 rather than a file system attribute.
926 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
927 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
928 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
929 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
931 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
932 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
933 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
935 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
936 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
937 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
940 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
944 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
945 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
947 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
949 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
950 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
952 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
953 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
954 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
955 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
957 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
958 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
959 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
963 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
964 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
966 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
967 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
968 duration after the initial signal was sent.
970 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
971 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
972 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
973 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
974 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
975 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
976 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
977 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
978 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
980 ** Changes in behavior
982 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
983 sequence when it would be a no-op.
985 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
986 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
989 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
993 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
994 of available processors, which may not have been the case
995 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
996 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1000 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1001 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1003 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1004 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1005 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1006 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1008 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1009 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1010 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1013 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1017 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1018 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1019 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1021 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1022 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1023 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1025 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1026 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1028 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1029 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1030 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1031 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1033 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1034 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1035 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1037 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1038 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1039 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1040 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1042 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1043 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1044 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1046 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1047 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1048 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1049 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1051 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1052 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1053 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1055 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1056 processes will not intersperse their output.
1057 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1060 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1064 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1065 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1067 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1068 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1070 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1071 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1072 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1073 the presence of the empty string argument.
1074 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1076 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1077 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1078 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1079 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1081 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1082 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1084 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1085 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1086 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1088 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1089 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1090 and with a malicious user on the same system
1091 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1092 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1095 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1099 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1100 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1101 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1103 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1104 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1105 offending directory and all "contents."
1107 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1108 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1109 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1111 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1112 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1113 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1115 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1116 processes will not intersperse their output.
1117 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1118 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1120 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1121 output the name of the file to stdout.
1122 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1124 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1125 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1126 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1128 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1129 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1132 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1133 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1134 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1136 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1137 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1138 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1139 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1140 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1141 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1143 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1144 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1145 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1146 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1148 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1149 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1151 ** Changes in behavior
1153 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1154 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1155 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1156 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1157 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1159 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1160 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1161 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1162 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1164 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1166 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1167 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1168 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1169 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1170 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1174 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1178 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1179 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1181 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1182 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1184 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1185 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1186 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1188 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1189 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1192 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1196 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1197 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1198 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1200 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1201 to accommodate leap seconds.
1202 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1204 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1205 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1206 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1208 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1210 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1211 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1212 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1214 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1215 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1216 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1217 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1218 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1222 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1223 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1224 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1225 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1227 ** Changes in behavior
1229 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1230 environment variable is set.
1232 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1233 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1234 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1238 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1239 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1240 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1241 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1243 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1244 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1245 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1246 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1250 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1251 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1252 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1254 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1255 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1256 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1257 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1258 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1259 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1260 another improvement:
1262 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1263 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1266 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1270 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1271 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1272 and libraries tested at configure time.
1273 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1275 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1276 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1278 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1279 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1281 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1282 printing a summary to stderr.
1283 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1285 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1286 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1287 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1289 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1290 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1292 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1293 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1294 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1295 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1297 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1298 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1299 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1300 which is relatively unusual.
1301 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1303 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1304 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1305 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1306 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1307 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1308 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1309 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1313 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1314 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1315 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1316 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1317 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1321 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1322 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1324 ** Changes in behavior
1326 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1327 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1328 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1329 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1330 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1333 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1337 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1338 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1340 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1341 before data copying has started.
1343 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1344 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1346 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1347 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1348 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1349 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1351 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1352 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1353 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1354 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1356 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1361 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1362 for its standard streams.
1364 ** Changes in behavior
1366 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1367 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1368 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1369 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1370 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1371 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1373 ** Deprecated options
1375 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1376 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1380 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1382 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1383 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1384 a btrfs file system.
1386 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1388 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1389 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1391 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1392 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1395 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1399 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1400 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1401 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1402 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1404 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1405 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1406 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1407 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1408 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1413 make check: two tests have been corrected
1417 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1418 inherited from gnulib.
1421 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1425 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1426 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1427 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1428 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1430 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1431 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1433 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1435 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1436 systems without xattr support.
1438 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1439 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1440 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1442 ** Changes in behavior
1444 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1445 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1446 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1447 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1449 ** Improved robustness
1451 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1452 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1453 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1454 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1455 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1456 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1457 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1458 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1459 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1463 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1464 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1466 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1467 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1468 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1469 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1470 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1473 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1477 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1478 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1479 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1483 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1484 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1485 data was read, or on process exit.
1486 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1488 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1489 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1490 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1491 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1493 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1494 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1495 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1496 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1498 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1499 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1501 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1502 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1504 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1505 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1506 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1508 ** Changes in behavior
1510 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1511 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1512 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1514 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1515 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1517 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1518 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1519 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1522 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1526 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1528 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1529 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1530 install: Never copies xattrs
1532 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1533 from overwriting any existing destination file
1535 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1536 mode where this feature is available.
1538 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1539 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1540 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1541 do not modify the destination at all.
1543 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1545 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1549 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1550 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1552 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1554 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1555 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1557 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1558 processing the first file name
1560 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1561 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1562 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1563 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1565 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1566 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1568 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1569 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1572 ** Changes in behavior
1574 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1575 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1577 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1578 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1579 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1581 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1582 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1584 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1586 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1587 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1588 is still marked with a '+'.
1591 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1595 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1596 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1600 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1601 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1602 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1603 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1604 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1605 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1607 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1608 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1610 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1611 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1613 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1615 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1616 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1617 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1619 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1620 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1622 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1623 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1624 used to factor large numbers.
1626 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1629 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1631 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1633 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1634 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1636 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1637 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1638 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1639 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1641 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1642 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1643 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1645 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1646 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1650 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1652 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1653 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1655 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1656 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1658 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1660 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1661 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1665 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1666 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1667 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1669 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1671 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1672 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1673 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1675 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1676 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1677 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1679 ** Changes in behavior
1681 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1682 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1685 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1689 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1690 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1691 'futimens' system calls.
1695 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1697 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1698 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1699 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1701 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1702 with no USERNAME argument.
1704 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1705 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1706 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1708 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1709 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1710 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1711 number of fields for some inputs.
1713 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1714 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1716 ** Changes in behavior
1718 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1719 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1722 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1726 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1728 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1729 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1730 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1731 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1733 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1734 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1736 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1737 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1739 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1740 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1742 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1743 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1744 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1745 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1747 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1748 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1749 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1750 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1751 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1752 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1754 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1755 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1757 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1758 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1759 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1761 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1762 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1764 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1765 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1767 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1768 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1769 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1770 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1772 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1773 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1775 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1776 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1778 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1779 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1780 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1784 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1785 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1787 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1788 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1789 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1790 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1794 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1795 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1797 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1799 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1803 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1804 which have negative errno values.
1808 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1812 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1816 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1817 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1820 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1824 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1825 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1826 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1828 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1829 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1830 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1831 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1835 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1836 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1837 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1838 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1841 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1845 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1847 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1848 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1849 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1852 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1856 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1857 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1859 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1861 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1863 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1865 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1869 ** Changes in behavior
1871 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1872 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1874 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1875 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1877 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1878 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1879 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1883 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1884 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1885 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1886 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1887 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1888 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1889 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1890 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1891 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1892 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1893 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1895 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1896 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1897 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1900 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1903 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1904 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1905 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1907 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1908 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1909 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1912 ** New build options
1914 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1915 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1916 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1917 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1919 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1920 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1921 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1922 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1923 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1924 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1925 of "make check" fail.
1927 ** Remove deprecated options
1929 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1930 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1931 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1932 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1933 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1935 ** Improved robustness
1937 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1938 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1939 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1940 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1941 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1942 loss of the contents of a/f.
1944 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1945 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1949 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1950 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1951 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1953 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1954 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1955 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1956 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1958 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1959 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1960 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1961 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1962 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1963 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1964 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1965 destination is a symlink.
1967 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1969 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1970 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1972 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1973 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1975 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1977 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1978 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1980 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1981 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1983 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1986 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1987 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1989 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1990 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1992 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1993 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1994 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1995 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1997 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1998 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1999 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2001 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2002 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2003 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2005 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2006 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2007 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2008 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2010 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2011 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2012 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2014 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2015 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2017 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2018 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2020 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2022 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2023 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2024 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2026 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2027 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2029 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2030 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2032 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2033 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2035 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2036 [present in the original version]
2039 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2043 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2045 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2046 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2047 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2049 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2050 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2052 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2056 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2057 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2059 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2060 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2062 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2063 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2065 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2066 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2067 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2068 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2069 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2070 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2072 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2073 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2076 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2077 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2079 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2082 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2083 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2084 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2086 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2087 directory is unreadable.
2089 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2090 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2091 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2093 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2094 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2095 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2096 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2097 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2100 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2101 Before it would print nothing.
2103 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2105 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2106 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2107 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2108 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2109 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2110 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2111 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2112 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2114 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2118 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2119 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2120 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2122 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2123 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2124 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2125 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2128 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2132 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2133 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2134 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2135 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2136 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2137 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2138 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2140 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2141 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2142 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2143 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2144 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2145 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2146 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2147 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2149 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2150 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2151 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2154 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2158 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2159 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2161 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2162 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2163 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2165 ** Improved robustness
2167 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2168 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2169 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2172 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2176 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2177 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2178 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2179 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2180 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2182 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2186 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2189 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2193 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2194 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2195 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2196 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2198 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2199 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2201 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2202 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2203 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2206 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2208 ** Improved robustness
2210 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2211 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2213 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2214 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2215 or NFS-mounted partition.
2217 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2218 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2222 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2223 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2224 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2225 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2226 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2227 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2229 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2230 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2232 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2233 or neglect to report file removal.
2235 For the "groups" command:
2237 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2238 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2240 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2242 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2244 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2248 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2249 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2252 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2254 ** Changes in behavior
2256 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2257 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2258 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2259 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2261 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2262 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2263 a final './' or '../' component.
2265 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2266 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2267 this only for pipes.
2269 ** Infrastructure changes
2271 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2272 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2273 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2274 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2278 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2279 name is "." or "..".
2281 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2282 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2283 dirent.d_type support.
2285 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2286 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2288 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2289 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2290 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2291 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2294 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2296 ** Changes in behavior
2298 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2302 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2303 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2307 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2308 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2309 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2311 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2312 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2314 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2315 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2317 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2319 ** Improved robustness
2321 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2322 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2323 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2325 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2326 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2329 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2330 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2332 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2333 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2335 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2336 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2338 ** Changes in behavior
2340 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2341 where the two are distinct.
2343 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2344 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2345 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2346 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2347 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2348 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2349 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2350 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2351 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2352 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2353 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2354 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2355 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2356 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2357 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2358 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2359 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2361 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2362 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2363 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2365 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2366 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2367 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2368 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2371 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2372 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2376 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2377 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2378 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2379 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2381 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2382 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2383 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2385 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2386 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2387 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2388 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2389 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2392 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2393 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2395 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2396 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2397 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2398 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2400 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2401 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2402 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2404 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2405 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2406 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2407 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2409 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2410 and sticky) with the -m option.
2412 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2413 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2414 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2415 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2416 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2418 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2419 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2421 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2425 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2426 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2427 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2428 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2430 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2432 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2434 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2435 silently ignoring one of them.
2437 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2438 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2439 containing this change was 5.92.
2441 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2442 automatically newline terminated.
2444 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2445 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2446 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2447 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2450 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2451 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2452 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2455 ** Scheduled for removal
2457 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2458 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2460 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2461 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2462 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2463 command to unlink a directory.
2465 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2466 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2467 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2468 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2472 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2473 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2474 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2475 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2476 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2477 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2481 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2482 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2484 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2486 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2487 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2488 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2490 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2491 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2494 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2495 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2497 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2498 list directories before files.
2500 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2501 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2502 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2503 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2506 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2508 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2510 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2511 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2512 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2514 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2515 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2519 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2520 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2521 usually printing nothing.
2523 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2525 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2526 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2527 them with hard-linked directories.
2529 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2530 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2531 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2533 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2534 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2535 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2537 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2540 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2541 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2543 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2544 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2546 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2547 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2549 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2550 all command-line arguments.
2552 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2554 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2556 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2557 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2559 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2561 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2562 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2563 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2564 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2565 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2567 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2568 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2570 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2571 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2572 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2573 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2575 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2577 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2581 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2582 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2584 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2585 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2587 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2588 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2590 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2591 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2593 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2594 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2596 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2598 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2599 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2600 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2603 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2605 ** Build-related bug fixes
2607 installing .mo files would fail
2610 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2614 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2616 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2619 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2623 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2624 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2628 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2630 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2631 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2633 ** Deprecated options
2635 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2636 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2638 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2642 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2644 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2645 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2646 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2647 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2649 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2652 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2658 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2663 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2665 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2667 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2668 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2669 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2671 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2672 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2673 problematic usages. These include:
2675 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2676 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2677 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2678 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2679 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2680 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2681 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2682 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2683 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2685 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2686 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2688 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2689 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2690 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2691 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2693 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2694 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2695 between binary and text files.
2697 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2701 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2705 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2706 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2708 head tac tail tee tr
2709 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2711 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2712 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2714 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2715 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2716 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2718 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2720 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2722 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2723 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2724 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2728 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2730 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2731 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2733 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2734 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2735 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2739 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2740 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2744 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2745 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2746 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2750 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2751 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2755 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2757 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2759 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2763 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2764 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2765 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2767 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2768 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2769 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2770 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2771 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2773 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2777 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2778 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2779 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2781 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2783 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2784 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2785 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2786 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2788 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2790 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2791 rather than silently wrapping around.
2793 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2794 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2796 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2797 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2799 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2800 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2801 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2802 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2804 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2806 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2808 ** Improved robustness
2810 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2811 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2812 no matter how large the result.
2814 ** Improved portability
2816 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2817 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2819 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2821 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2822 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2823 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2825 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2826 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2830 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2831 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2833 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2835 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2836 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2837 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2838 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2840 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2841 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2843 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2844 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2845 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2847 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2849 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2850 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2852 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2853 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2855 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2857 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2858 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2860 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2861 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2863 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2864 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2865 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2867 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2869 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2871 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2875 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2877 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2878 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2879 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2881 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2882 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2884 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2885 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2886 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2888 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2889 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2891 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2892 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2893 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2894 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2896 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2897 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2899 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2900 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2901 the file system does not support it.
2903 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2905 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2906 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2908 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2910 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2911 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2913 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2914 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2915 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2916 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2918 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2919 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2922 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2923 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2924 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2925 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2927 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2928 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2929 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2930 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2932 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2933 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2935 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2937 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2938 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2939 reporting incorrect results.
2943 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2944 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2946 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2949 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2951 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2952 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2954 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2955 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2957 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2960 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2961 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2962 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2963 the file name does not look like a page range.
2965 printf has several changes:
2967 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2968 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2970 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2971 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2972 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2974 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2975 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2978 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2979 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2981 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2982 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2984 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2986 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2987 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2989 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2991 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2993 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2994 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2995 when first encountering the directory.
2999 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3000 output; POSIX requires this.
3002 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3003 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3005 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3007 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3008 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3010 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3011 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3013 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3014 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3015 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3016 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3017 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3018 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3019 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3021 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3022 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3023 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3025 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3026 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3028 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3030 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3032 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3033 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3034 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3035 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3037 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3041 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3042 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3043 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3044 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3045 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3047 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3048 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3049 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3051 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3052 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3054 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3055 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3057 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3058 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3059 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3060 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3061 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3063 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3064 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3066 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3067 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3069 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3071 nocreat do not create the output file
3072 excl fail if the output file already exists
3073 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3074 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3076 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3078 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3079 direct use direct I/O for data
3080 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3081 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3082 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3083 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3084 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3086 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3088 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3089 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3092 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3093 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3094 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3095 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3096 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3097 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3099 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3100 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3102 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3105 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3107 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3109 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3110 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3112 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3113 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3114 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3116 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3117 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3118 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3120 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3122 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3123 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3125 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3126 for compatibility with bash.
3128 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3130 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3131 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3132 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3133 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3135 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3136 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3138 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3139 ls supports TABSIZE.
3140 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3141 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3142 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3144 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3147 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3149 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3150 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3151 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3152 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3153 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3154 an offset, not as a file name.
3156 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3157 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3159 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3160 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3162 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3163 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3165 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3166 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3167 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3169 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3170 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3172 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3173 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3177 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3179 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3181 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3185 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3186 or more arguments between partitions.
3188 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3189 holes in the destination.
3191 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3192 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3193 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3194 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3195 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3196 terminates immediately.
3198 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3200 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3202 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3203 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3204 not the empty string.
3206 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3207 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3211 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3212 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3213 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3216 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3223 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3227 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3228 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3230 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3231 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3233 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3234 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3235 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3238 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3242 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3243 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3245 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3246 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3248 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3249 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3250 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3252 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3254 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3257 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3259 ** Configuration option
3261 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3262 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3266 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3267 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3271 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3272 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3273 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3276 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3277 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3278 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3279 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3280 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3281 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3282 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3285 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3289 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3290 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3291 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3293 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3294 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3296 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3298 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3299 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3300 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3301 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3303 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3305 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3306 not just the ones that reference directories
3308 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3309 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3311 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3312 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3313 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3315 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3316 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3317 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3318 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3319 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3320 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3322 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3327 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3328 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3330 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3332 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3334 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3336 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3337 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3339 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3340 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3342 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3344 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3348 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3350 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3352 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3353 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3354 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3355 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3356 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3358 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3359 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3361 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3362 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3364 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3365 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3367 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3368 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3369 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3373 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3374 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3375 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3376 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3377 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3378 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3379 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3380 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3381 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3382 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3383 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3384 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3385 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3386 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3388 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3390 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3391 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3393 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3395 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3397 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3398 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3400 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3402 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3403 without a trailing newline.
3405 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3406 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3408 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3411 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3415 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3417 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3419 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3420 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3421 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3422 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3424 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3426 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3427 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3428 be printed without leading spaces.
3430 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3431 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3436 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3437 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3438 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3440 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3442 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3443 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3445 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3446 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3448 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3449 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3451 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3453 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3455 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3457 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3458 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3460 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3462 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3464 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3465 byte offsets are specified.
3468 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3471 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3474 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3475 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3476 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3477 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3478 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3479 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3480 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3481 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3482 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3483 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3484 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3485 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3486 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3487 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3488 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3489 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3490 directory where M has write access.
3491 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3492 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3493 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3496 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3497 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3498 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3499 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3500 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3501 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3502 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3503 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3504 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3505 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3506 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3507 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3508 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3509 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3510 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3511 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3512 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3513 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3514 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3515 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3516 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3517 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3518 appeared one additional time.
3520 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3521 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3522 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3523 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3526 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3527 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3528 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3529 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3530 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3531 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3532 if there were more than 338.
3534 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3535 - false --help now exits nonzero
3538 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3539 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3540 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3541 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3544 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3545 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3546 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3547 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3548 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3551 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3552 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3553 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3554 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3555 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3556 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3557 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3560 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3561 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3562 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3563 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3564 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3565 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3567 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3568 under certain unusual conditions
3569 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3570 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3573 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3574 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3575 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3576 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3577 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3578 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3579 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3580 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3581 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3582 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3583 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3584 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3585 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3586 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3587 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3588 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3591 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3592 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3595 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3596 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3597 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3598 involving hard-linked directories
3599 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3600 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3601 character-special and block files
3604 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3605 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3606 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3607 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3608 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3609 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3610 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3611 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3612 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3614 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3615 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3616 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3617 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3618 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3619 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3620 specified on the command line.
3621 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3622 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3623 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3624 the first file untouched.
3625 * readlink: new program
3626 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3627 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3628 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3629 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3630 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3631 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3634 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3635 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3636 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3637 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3638 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3639 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3640 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3641 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3642 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3643 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3644 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3645 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3647 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3648 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3649 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3651 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3652 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3653 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3654 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3655 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3656 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3657 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3658 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3661 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3662 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3665 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3666 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3667 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3668 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3669 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3670 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3671 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3674 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3675 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3677 ========================================================================
3678 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3679 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3682 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3684 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3685 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3686 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3687 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3688 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3689 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3690 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3691 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3692 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3693 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3694 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3695 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3697 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3698 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3699 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3700 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3702 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3705 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3707 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3708 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3709 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3710 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3711 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3712 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3713 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3716 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3717 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3718 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3719 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3720 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3721 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3722 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3723 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3724 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3725 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3726 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3727 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3728 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3729 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3730 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3731 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3733 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3734 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3736 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3737 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3738 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3739 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3740 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3741 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3743 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3744 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3745 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3746 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3747 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3748 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3749 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3751 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3752 the source files in the following example:
3753 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3754 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3755 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3756 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3757 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3758 links between source files with --preserve=links
3759 * cp accepts new options:
3760 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3761 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3762 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3763 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3764 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3765 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3766 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3767 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3768 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3770 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3771 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3772 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3773 even though it's older than dest.
3774 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3775 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3776 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3777 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3778 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3780 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3781 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3782 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3783 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3784 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3785 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3786 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3788 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3789 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3790 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3792 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3793 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3794 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3795 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3796 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3797 This is the default.
3799 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3800 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3801 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3802 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3803 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3805 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3808 ========================================================================
3809 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3810 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3813 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3814 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3816 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3817 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3818 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3819 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3820 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3822 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3823 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3824 that specifies a non-directory
3827 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3828 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3829 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3830 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3831 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3832 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3833 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3834 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3835 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3836 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3837 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3838 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3839 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3840 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3841 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3842 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3843 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3844 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3845 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3846 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3847 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3848 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3849 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3850 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3852 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3853 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3854 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3856 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3858 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3859 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3861 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3862 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3863 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3864 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3865 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3867 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3868 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3869 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3870 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3871 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3873 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3875 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3876 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3877 * still more portability fixes
3878 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3879 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3881 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3883 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3885 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3887 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3888 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3889 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3890 there is any time remaining
3891 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3893 ========================================================================
3894 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3895 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3897 This package began as the union of the following:
3898 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3900 ========================================================================
3902 Copyright (C) 2001-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3904 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3905 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3906 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3907 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3908 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3909 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.