1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
8 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
9 sha384sum and sha512sum.
13 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
14 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
15 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
16 eventually exits nonzero.
18 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
19 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
20 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
21 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
22 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
24 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
25 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
26 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
28 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
29 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
30 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
32 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
33 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
34 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
36 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
37 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
38 Before, this would infloop:
39 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
40 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
42 ** Changes in behavior
44 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
48 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
49 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
50 format-changing options.
52 stat and tail work better with ZFS and VZFS. stat -f --format=%T now
53 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files
54 on those file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file system
55 types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
59 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
60 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
61 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
62 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
63 are run without following the instructions in README.
66 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
70 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
71 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
72 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
73 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
75 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
76 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
77 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
78 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
80 sort -u could read freed memory.
81 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
82 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
83 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
87 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
88 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
89 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
90 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
93 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
97 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
98 processes will not intersperse their output.
99 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
101 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
102 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
103 date: invalid date '\260'
104 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
106 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
107 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
108 lines output by df, can work reliably.
109 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
111 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
112 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
113 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
115 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
116 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
117 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
118 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
119 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
120 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
122 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
123 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
125 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
126 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
128 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
129 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
130 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
132 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
133 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
134 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
138 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
140 ** Changes in behavior
142 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
143 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
144 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
145 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
146 have any reason to include it here.
150 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
151 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
152 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
154 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
155 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
156 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
159 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
163 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
164 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
165 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
166 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
167 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
168 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
170 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
171 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
172 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
173 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
174 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
175 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
176 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
178 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
179 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
181 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
182 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
186 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
187 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
189 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
191 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
193 ** Changes in behavior
195 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
196 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
197 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
199 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
200 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
203 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
207 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
208 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
209 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
210 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
211 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
212 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
213 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
214 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
216 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
217 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
218 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
219 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
220 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
222 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
223 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
225 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
226 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
228 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
229 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
231 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
232 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
234 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
235 additional static suffix to output file names.
237 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
238 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
239 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
241 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
242 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
246 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
247 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
248 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
250 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
251 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
252 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
253 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
254 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
255 typically still point to one of the hard links.
257 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
258 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
259 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
260 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
261 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
263 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
264 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
265 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
266 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
270 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
271 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
272 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
274 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
275 instead of causing a usage failure.
277 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
280 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
284 realpath: print resolved file names.
288 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
289 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
291 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
292 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
294 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
295 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
296 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
297 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
298 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
299 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
301 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
302 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
303 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
305 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
306 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
307 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
309 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
310 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
311 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
312 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
313 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
315 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
317 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
318 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
320 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
321 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
322 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
324 ** Changes in behavior
326 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
327 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
328 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
329 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
330 usually-short referent instead.
332 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
333 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
334 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
335 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
338 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
342 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
343 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
344 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
346 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
347 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
349 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
350 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
354 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
355 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
357 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
358 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
359 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
360 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
362 ** Changes in behavior
364 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
365 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
366 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
370 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
371 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
372 only .tar.xz files is enough.
375 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
379 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
380 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
381 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
383 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
384 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
386 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
387 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
388 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
389 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
390 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
392 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
393 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
394 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
395 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
396 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
397 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
398 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
399 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
401 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
402 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
404 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
405 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
407 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
408 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
410 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
411 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
412 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
414 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
415 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
416 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
417 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
419 ** Changes in behavior
421 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
422 when -v or -c specified.
424 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
425 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
429 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
430 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
431 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
432 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
433 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
435 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
436 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
437 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
439 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
440 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
441 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
442 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
443 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
444 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
445 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
447 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
448 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
449 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
453 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
454 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
456 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
459 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
460 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
462 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
463 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
465 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
466 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
468 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
470 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
474 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
475 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
477 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
480 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
484 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
485 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
487 ** Changes in behavior
489 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
490 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
491 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
492 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
493 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
494 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
496 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
497 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
498 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
502 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
505 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
509 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
510 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
511 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
513 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
514 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
515 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
517 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
518 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
519 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
521 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
522 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
524 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
525 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
527 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
528 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
530 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
531 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
535 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
536 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
537 processed portion thereof.
539 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
540 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
542 ** Changes in behavior
544 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
545 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
546 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
548 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
549 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
550 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
552 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
553 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
555 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
556 Use --preserve-context instead.
558 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
561 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
565 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
566 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
567 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
568 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
569 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
571 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
572 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
574 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
575 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
576 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
578 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
579 reject file names invalid for that file system.
581 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
582 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
586 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
587 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
588 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
589 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
590 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
591 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
592 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
593 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
595 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
596 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
597 the same number of fields are output for each line.
599 ** Changes in behavior
601 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
602 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
603 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
606 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
610 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
611 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
612 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
615 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
619 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
620 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
622 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
623 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
625 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
626 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
628 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
629 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
630 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
631 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
633 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
634 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
636 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
637 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
638 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
640 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
642 ** Changes in behavior
644 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
645 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
646 to the number of available processors.
650 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
653 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
657 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
658 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
659 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
660 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
662 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
663 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
664 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
666 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
667 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
669 ** Changes in behavior
671 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
672 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
674 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
675 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
676 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
677 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
678 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
679 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
681 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
682 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
683 the same way as the others.
686 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
690 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
691 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
692 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
694 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
695 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
697 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
698 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
699 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
701 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
702 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
704 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
705 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
707 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
708 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
709 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
711 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
712 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
713 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
714 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
718 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
719 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
721 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
724 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
725 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
727 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
729 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
730 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
731 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
733 ** Changes in behavior
735 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
736 rather than its aliased target.
738 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
739 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
740 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
742 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
743 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
744 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
745 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
746 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
747 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
748 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
749 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
751 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
753 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
755 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
756 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
759 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
760 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
761 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
762 control like taskset for example.
764 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
766 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
767 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
768 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
769 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
770 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
771 includes %C when context information is available.
773 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
774 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
775 rather than a file system attribute.
777 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
778 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
779 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
780 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
782 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
783 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
784 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
786 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
787 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
788 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
791 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
795 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
796 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
798 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
800 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
801 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
803 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
804 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
805 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
806 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
808 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
809 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
810 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
814 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
815 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
817 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
818 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
819 duration after the initial signal was sent.
821 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
822 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
823 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
824 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
825 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
826 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
827 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
828 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
829 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
831 ** Changes in behavior
833 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
834 sequence when it would be a no-op.
836 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
837 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
840 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
844 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
845 of available processors, which may not have been the case
846 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
847 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
851 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
852 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
854 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
855 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
856 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
857 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
859 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
860 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
861 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
864 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
868 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
869 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
870 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
872 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
873 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
874 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
876 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
877 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
879 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
880 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
881 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
882 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
884 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
885 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
886 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
888 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
889 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
890 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
891 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
893 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
894 renamed-aside and then recreated.
895 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
897 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
898 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
899 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
900 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
902 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
903 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
904 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
906 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
907 processes will not intersperse their output.
908 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
911 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
915 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
916 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
918 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
919 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
921 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
922 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
923 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
924 the presence of the empty string argument.
925 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
927 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
928 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
929 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
930 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
932 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
933 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
935 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
936 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
937 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
939 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
940 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
941 and with a malicious user on the same system
942 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
943 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
946 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
950 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
951 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
952 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
954 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
955 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
956 offending directory and all "contents."
958 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
959 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
960 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
962 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
963 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
964 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
966 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
967 processes will not intersperse their output.
968 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
969 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
971 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
972 output the name of the file to stdout.
973 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
975 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
976 call fails with errno == EACCES.
977 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
979 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
980 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
983 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
984 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
985 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
987 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
988 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
989 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
990 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
991 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
992 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
994 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
995 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
996 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
997 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
999 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1000 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1002 ** Changes in behavior
1004 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1005 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1006 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1007 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1008 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1010 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1011 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1012 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1013 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1015 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1017 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1018 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1019 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1020 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1021 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1025 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1029 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1030 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1032 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1033 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1035 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1036 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1037 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1039 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1040 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1043 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1047 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1048 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1049 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1051 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1052 to accommodate leap seconds.
1053 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1055 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1056 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1057 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1059 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1061 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1062 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1063 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1065 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1066 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1067 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1068 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1069 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1073 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1074 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1075 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1076 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1078 ** Changes in behavior
1080 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1081 environment variable is set.
1083 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1084 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1085 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1089 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1090 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1091 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1092 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1094 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1095 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1096 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1097 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1101 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1102 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1103 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1105 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1106 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1107 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1108 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1109 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1110 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1111 another improvement:
1113 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1114 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1117 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1121 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1122 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1123 and libraries tested at configure time.
1124 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1126 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1127 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1129 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1130 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1132 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1133 printing a summary to stderr.
1134 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1136 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1137 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1138 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1140 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1141 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1143 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1144 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1145 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1146 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1148 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1149 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1150 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1151 which is relatively unusual.
1152 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1154 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1155 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1156 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1157 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1158 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1159 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1160 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1164 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1165 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1166 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1167 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1168 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1172 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1173 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1175 ** Changes in behavior
1177 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1178 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1179 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1180 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1181 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1184 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1188 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1189 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1191 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1192 before data copying has started.
1194 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1195 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1197 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1198 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1199 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1200 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1202 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1203 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1204 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1205 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1207 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1212 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1213 for its standard streams.
1215 ** Changes in behavior
1217 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1218 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1219 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1220 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1221 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1222 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1224 ** Deprecated options
1226 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1227 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1231 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1233 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1234 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1235 a btrfs file system.
1237 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1239 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1240 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1242 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1243 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1246 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1250 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1251 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1252 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1253 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1255 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1256 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1257 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1258 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1259 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1264 make check: two tests have been corrected
1268 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1269 inherited from gnulib.
1272 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1276 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1277 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1278 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1279 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1281 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1282 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1284 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1286 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1287 systems without xattr support.
1289 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1290 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1291 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1293 ** Changes in behavior
1295 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1296 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1297 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1298 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1300 ** Improved robustness
1302 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1303 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1304 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1305 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1306 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1307 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1308 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1309 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1310 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1314 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1315 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1317 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1318 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1319 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1320 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1321 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1324 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1328 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1329 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1330 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1334 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1335 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1336 data was read, or on process exit.
1337 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1339 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1340 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1341 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1342 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1344 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1345 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1346 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1347 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1349 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1350 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1352 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1353 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1355 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1356 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1357 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1359 ** Changes in behavior
1361 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1362 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1363 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1365 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1366 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1368 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1369 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1370 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1373 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1377 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1379 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1380 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1381 install: Never copies xattrs
1383 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1384 from overwriting any existing destination file
1386 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1387 mode where this feature is available.
1389 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1390 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1391 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1392 do not modify the destination at all.
1394 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1396 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1400 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1401 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1403 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1405 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1406 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1408 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1409 processing the first file name
1411 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1412 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1413 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1414 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1416 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1417 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1419 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1420 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1423 ** Changes in behavior
1425 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1426 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1428 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1429 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1430 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1432 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1433 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1435 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1437 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1438 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1439 is still marked with a '+'.
1442 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1446 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1447 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1451 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1452 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1453 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1454 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1455 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1456 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1458 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1459 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1461 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1462 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1464 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1466 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1467 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1468 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1470 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1471 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1473 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1474 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1475 used to factor large numbers.
1477 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1480 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1482 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1484 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1485 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1487 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1488 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1489 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1490 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1492 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1493 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1494 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1496 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1497 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1501 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1503 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1504 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1506 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1507 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1509 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1511 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1512 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1516 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1517 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1518 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1520 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1522 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1523 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1524 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1526 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1527 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1528 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1530 ** Changes in behavior
1532 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1533 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1536 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1540 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1541 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1542 'futimens' system calls.
1546 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1548 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1549 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1550 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1552 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1553 with no USERNAME argument.
1555 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1556 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1557 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1559 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1560 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1561 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1562 number of fields for some inputs.
1564 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1565 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1567 ** Changes in behavior
1569 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1570 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1573 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1577 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1579 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1580 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1581 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1582 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1584 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1585 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1587 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1588 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1590 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1591 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1593 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1594 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1595 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1596 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1598 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1599 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1600 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1601 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1602 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1603 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1605 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1606 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1608 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1609 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1610 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1612 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1613 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1615 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1616 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1618 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1619 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1620 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1621 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1623 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1624 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1626 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1627 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1629 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1630 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1631 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1635 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1636 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1638 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1639 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1640 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1641 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1645 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1646 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1648 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1650 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1654 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1655 which have negative errno values.
1659 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1663 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1667 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1668 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1671 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1675 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1676 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1677 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1679 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1680 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1681 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1682 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1686 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1687 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1688 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1689 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1692 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1696 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1698 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1699 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1700 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1703 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1707 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1708 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1710 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1712 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1714 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1716 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1720 ** Changes in behavior
1722 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1723 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1725 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1726 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1728 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1729 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1730 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1734 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1735 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1736 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1737 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1738 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1739 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1740 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1741 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1742 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1743 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1744 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1746 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1747 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1748 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1751 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1754 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1755 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1756 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1758 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1759 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1760 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1763 ** New build options
1765 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1766 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1767 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1768 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1770 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1771 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1772 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1773 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1774 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1775 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1776 of "make check" fail.
1778 ** Remove deprecated options
1780 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1781 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1782 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1783 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1784 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1786 ** Improved robustness
1788 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1789 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1790 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1791 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1792 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1793 loss of the contents of a/f.
1795 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1796 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1800 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1801 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1802 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1804 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1805 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1806 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1807 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1809 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1810 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1811 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1812 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1813 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1814 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1815 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1816 destination is a symlink.
1818 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1820 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1821 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1823 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1824 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1826 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1828 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1829 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1831 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1832 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1834 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1837 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1838 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1840 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1841 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1843 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1844 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1845 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1846 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1848 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1849 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1850 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1852 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1853 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1854 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1856 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1857 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1858 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1859 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1861 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1862 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1863 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1865 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1866 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1868 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1869 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1871 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1873 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1874 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1875 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1877 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1878 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1880 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1881 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1883 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1884 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1886 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1887 [present in the original version]
1890 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1894 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1896 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1897 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1898 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1900 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1901 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1903 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1907 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1908 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1910 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1911 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1913 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1914 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1916 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1917 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1918 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1919 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1920 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1921 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1923 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1924 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1927 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1928 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1930 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1933 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1934 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1935 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1937 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1938 directory is unreadable.
1940 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1941 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1942 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1944 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1945 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1946 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1947 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1948 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1951 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1952 Before it would print nothing.
1954 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1956 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1957 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1958 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1959 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1960 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1961 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1962 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1963 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1965 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1969 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1970 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1971 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1973 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1974 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1975 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1976 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1979 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1983 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1984 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1985 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1986 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1987 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1988 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1989 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1991 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1992 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1993 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1994 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1995 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1996 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1997 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1998 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2000 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2001 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2002 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2005 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2009 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2010 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2012 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2013 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2014 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2016 ** Improved robustness
2018 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2019 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2020 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2023 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2027 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2028 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2029 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2030 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2031 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2033 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2037 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2040 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2044 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2045 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2046 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2047 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2049 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2050 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2052 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2053 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2054 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2057 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2059 ** Improved robustness
2061 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2062 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2064 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2065 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2066 or NFS-mounted partition.
2068 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2069 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2073 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2074 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2075 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2076 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2077 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2078 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2080 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2081 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2083 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2084 or neglect to report file removal.
2086 For the "groups" command:
2088 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2089 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2091 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2093 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2095 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2099 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2100 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2103 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2105 ** Changes in behavior
2107 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2108 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2109 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2110 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2112 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2113 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2114 a final './' or '../' component.
2116 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2117 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2118 this only for pipes.
2120 ** Infrastructure changes
2122 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2123 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2124 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2125 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2129 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2130 name is "." or "..".
2132 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2133 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2134 dirent.d_type support.
2136 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2137 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2139 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2140 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2141 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2142 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2145 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2147 ** Changes in behavior
2149 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2153 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2154 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2158 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2159 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2160 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2162 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2163 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2165 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2166 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2168 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2170 ** Improved robustness
2172 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2173 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2174 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2176 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2177 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2180 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2181 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2183 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2184 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2186 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2187 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2189 ** Changes in behavior
2191 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2192 where the two are distinct.
2194 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2195 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2196 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2197 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2198 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2199 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2200 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2201 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2202 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2203 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2204 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2205 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2206 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2207 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2208 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2209 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2210 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2212 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2213 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2214 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2216 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2217 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2218 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2219 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2222 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2223 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2227 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2228 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2229 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2230 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2232 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2233 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2234 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2236 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2237 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2238 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2239 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2240 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2243 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2244 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2246 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2247 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2248 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2249 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2251 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2252 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2253 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2255 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2256 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2257 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2258 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2260 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2261 and sticky) with the -m option.
2263 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2264 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2265 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2266 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2267 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2269 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2270 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2272 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2276 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2277 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2278 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2279 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2281 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2283 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2285 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2286 silently ignoring one of them.
2288 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2289 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2290 containing this change was 5.92.
2292 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2293 automatically newline terminated.
2295 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2296 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2297 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2298 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2301 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2302 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2303 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2306 ** Scheduled for removal
2308 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2309 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2311 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2312 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2313 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2314 command to unlink a directory.
2316 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2317 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2318 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2319 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2323 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2324 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2325 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2326 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2327 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2328 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2332 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2333 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2335 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2337 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2338 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2339 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2341 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2342 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2345 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2346 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2348 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2349 list directories before files.
2351 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2352 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2353 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2354 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2357 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2359 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2361 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2362 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2363 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2365 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2366 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2370 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2371 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2372 usually printing nothing.
2374 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2376 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2377 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2378 them with hard-linked directories.
2380 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2381 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2382 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2384 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2385 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2386 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2388 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2391 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2392 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2394 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2395 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2397 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2398 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2400 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2401 all command-line arguments.
2403 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2405 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2407 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2408 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2410 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2412 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2413 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2414 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2415 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2416 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2418 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2419 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2421 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2422 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2423 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2424 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2426 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2428 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2432 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2433 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2435 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2436 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2438 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2439 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2441 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2442 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2444 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2445 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2447 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2449 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2450 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2451 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2454 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2456 ** Build-related bug fixes
2458 installing .mo files would fail
2461 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2465 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2467 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2470 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2474 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2475 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2479 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2481 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2482 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2484 ** Deprecated options
2486 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2487 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2489 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2493 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2495 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2496 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2497 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2498 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2500 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2503 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2509 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2514 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2516 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2518 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2519 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2520 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2522 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2523 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2524 problematic usages. These include:
2526 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2527 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2528 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2529 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2530 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2531 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2532 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2533 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2534 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2536 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2537 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2539 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2540 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2541 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2542 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2544 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2545 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2546 between binary and text files.
2548 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2552 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2556 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2557 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2559 head tac tail tee tr
2560 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2562 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2563 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2565 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2566 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2567 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2569 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2571 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2573 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2574 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2575 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2579 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2581 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2582 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2584 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2585 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2586 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2590 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2591 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2595 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2596 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2597 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2601 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2602 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2606 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2608 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2610 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2614 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2615 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2616 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2618 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2619 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2620 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2621 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2622 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2624 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2628 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2629 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2630 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2632 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2634 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2635 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2636 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2637 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2639 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2641 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2642 rather than silently wrapping around.
2644 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2645 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2647 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2648 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2650 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2651 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2652 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2653 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2655 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2657 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2659 ** Improved robustness
2661 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2662 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2663 no matter how large the result.
2665 ** Improved portability
2667 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2668 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2670 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2672 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2673 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2674 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2676 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2677 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2681 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2682 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2684 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2686 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2687 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2688 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2689 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2691 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2692 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2694 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2695 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2696 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2698 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2700 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2701 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2703 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2704 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2706 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2708 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2709 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2711 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2712 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2714 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2715 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2716 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2718 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2720 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2722 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2726 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2728 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2729 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2730 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2732 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2733 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2735 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2736 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2737 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2739 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2740 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2742 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2743 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2744 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2745 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2747 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2748 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2750 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2751 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2752 the file system does not support it.
2754 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2756 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2757 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2759 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2761 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2762 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2764 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2765 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2766 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2767 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2769 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2770 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2773 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2774 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2775 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2776 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2778 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2779 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2780 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2781 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2783 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2784 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2786 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2788 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2789 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2790 reporting incorrect results.
2794 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2795 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2797 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2800 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2802 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2803 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2805 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2806 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2808 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2811 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2812 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2813 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2814 the file name does not look like a page range.
2816 printf has several changes:
2818 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2819 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2821 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2822 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2823 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2825 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2826 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2829 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2830 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2832 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2833 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2835 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2837 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2838 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2840 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2842 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2844 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2845 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2846 when first encountering the directory.
2850 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2851 output; POSIX requires this.
2853 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2854 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2856 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2858 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2859 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2861 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2862 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2864 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2865 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2866 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2867 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2868 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2869 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2870 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2872 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2873 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2874 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2876 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2877 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2879 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2881 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2883 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2884 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2885 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2886 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2888 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2892 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2893 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2894 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2895 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
2896 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
2898 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2899 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2900 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2902 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2903 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2905 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2906 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2908 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2909 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2910 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2911 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2912 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2914 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2915 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2917 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2918 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2920 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2922 nocreat do not create the output file
2923 excl fail if the output file already exists
2924 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2925 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2927 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2929 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2930 direct use direct I/O for data
2931 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2932 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2933 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2934 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2935 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2937 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2939 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2940 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
2943 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2944 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2945 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2946 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2947 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2948 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2950 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2951 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2953 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2956 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2958 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2960 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2961 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2963 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2964 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2965 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2967 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2968 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2969 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2971 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2973 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2974 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2976 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2977 for compatibility with bash.
2979 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2981 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2982 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2983 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2984 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2986 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2987 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2989 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2990 ls supports TABSIZE.
2991 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2992 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2993 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2995 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2998 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3000 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3001 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3002 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3003 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3004 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3005 an offset, not as a file name.
3007 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3008 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3010 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3011 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3013 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3014 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3016 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3017 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3018 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3020 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3021 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3023 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3024 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3028 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3030 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3032 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3036 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3037 or more arguments between partitions.
3039 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3040 holes in the destination.
3042 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3043 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3044 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3045 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3046 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3047 terminates immediately.
3049 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3051 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3053 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3054 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3055 not the empty string.
3057 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3058 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3062 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3063 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3064 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3067 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3074 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3078 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3079 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3081 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3082 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3084 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3085 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3086 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3089 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3093 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3094 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3096 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3097 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3099 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3100 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3101 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3103 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3105 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3108 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3110 ** Configuration option
3112 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3113 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3117 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3118 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3122 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3123 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3124 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3127 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3128 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3129 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3130 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3131 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3132 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3133 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3136 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3140 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3141 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3142 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3144 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3145 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3147 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3149 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3150 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3151 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3152 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3154 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3156 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3157 not just the ones that reference directories
3159 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3160 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3162 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3163 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3164 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3166 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3167 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3168 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3169 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3170 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3171 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3173 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3178 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3179 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3181 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3183 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3185 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3187 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3188 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3190 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3191 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3193 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3195 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3199 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3201 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3203 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3204 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3205 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3206 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3207 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3209 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3210 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3212 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3213 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3215 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3216 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3218 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3219 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3220 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3224 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3225 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3226 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3227 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3228 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3229 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3230 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3231 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3232 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3233 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3234 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3235 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3236 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3237 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3239 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3241 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3242 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3244 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3246 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3248 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3249 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3251 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3253 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3254 without a trailing newline.
3256 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3257 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3259 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3262 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3266 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3268 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3270 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3271 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3272 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3273 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3275 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3277 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3278 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3279 be printed without leading spaces.
3281 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3282 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3287 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3288 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3289 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3291 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3293 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3294 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3296 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3297 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3299 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3300 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3302 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3304 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3306 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3308 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3309 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3311 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3313 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3315 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3316 byte offsets are specified.
3319 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3322 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3325 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3326 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3327 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3328 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3329 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3330 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3331 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3332 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3333 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3334 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3335 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3336 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3337 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3338 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3339 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3340 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3341 directory where M has write access.
3342 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3343 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3344 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3347 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3348 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3349 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3350 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3351 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3352 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3353 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3354 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3355 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3356 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3357 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3358 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3359 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3360 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3361 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3362 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3363 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3364 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3365 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3366 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3367 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3368 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3369 appeared one additional time.
3371 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3372 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3373 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3374 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3377 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3378 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3379 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3380 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3381 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3382 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3383 if there were more than 338.
3385 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3386 - false --help now exits nonzero
3389 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3390 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3391 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3392 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3395 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3396 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3397 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3398 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3399 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3402 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3403 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3404 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3405 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3406 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3407 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3408 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3411 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3412 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3413 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3414 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3415 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3416 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3418 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3419 under certain unusual conditions
3420 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3421 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3424 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3425 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3426 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3427 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3428 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3429 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3430 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3431 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3432 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3433 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3434 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3435 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3436 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3437 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3438 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3439 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3442 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3443 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3446 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3447 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3448 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3449 involving hard-linked directories
3450 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3451 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3452 character-special and block files
3455 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3456 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3457 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3458 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3459 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3460 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3461 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3462 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3463 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3465 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3466 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3467 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3468 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3469 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3470 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3471 specified on the command line.
3472 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3473 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3474 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3475 the first file untouched.
3476 * readlink: new program
3477 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3478 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3479 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3480 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3481 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3482 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3485 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3486 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3487 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3488 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3489 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3490 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3491 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3492 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3493 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3494 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3495 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3496 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3498 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3499 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3500 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3502 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3503 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3504 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3505 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3506 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3507 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3508 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3509 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3512 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3513 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3516 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3517 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3518 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3519 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3520 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3521 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3522 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3525 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3526 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3528 ========================================================================
3529 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3530 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3533 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3535 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3536 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3537 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3538 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3539 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3540 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3541 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3542 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3543 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3544 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3545 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3546 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3548 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3549 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3550 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3551 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3553 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3556 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3558 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3559 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3560 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3561 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3562 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3563 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3564 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3567 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3568 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3569 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3570 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3571 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3572 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3573 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3574 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3575 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3576 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3577 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3578 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3579 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3580 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3581 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3582 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3584 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3585 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3587 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3588 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3589 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3590 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3591 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3592 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3594 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3595 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3596 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3597 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3598 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3599 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3600 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3602 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3603 the source files in the following example:
3604 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3605 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3606 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3607 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3608 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3609 links between source files with --preserve=links
3610 * cp accepts new options:
3611 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3612 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3613 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3614 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3615 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3616 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3617 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3618 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3619 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3621 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3622 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3623 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3624 even though it's older than dest.
3625 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3626 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3627 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3628 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3629 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3631 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3632 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3633 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3634 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3635 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3636 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3637 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3639 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3640 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3641 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3643 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3644 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3645 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3646 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3647 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3648 This is the default.
3650 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3651 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3652 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3653 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3654 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3656 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3659 ========================================================================
3660 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3661 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3664 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3665 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3667 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3668 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3669 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3670 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3671 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3673 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3674 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3675 that specifies a non-directory
3678 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3679 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3680 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3681 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3682 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3683 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3684 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3685 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3686 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3687 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3688 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3689 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3690 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3691 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3692 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3693 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3694 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3695 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3696 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3697 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3698 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3699 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3700 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3701 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3703 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3704 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3705 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3707 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3709 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3710 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3712 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3713 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3714 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3715 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3716 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3718 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3719 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3720 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3721 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3722 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3724 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3726 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3727 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3728 * still more portability fixes
3729 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3730 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3732 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3734 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3736 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3738 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3739 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3740 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3741 there is any time remaining
3742 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3744 ========================================================================
3745 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3746 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3748 This package began as the union of the following:
3749 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3751 ========================================================================
3753 Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3755 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3756 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3757 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3758 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3759 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3760 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.