1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
8 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
9 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
10 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
11 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
12 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
14 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
15 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
16 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
17 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
18 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
19 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
20 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
22 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
23 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
27 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
29 ** Changes in behavior
31 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
32 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
33 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
35 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
36 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
39 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
43 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
44 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
45 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
46 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
47 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
48 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
49 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
50 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
52 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
53 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
54 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
55 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
56 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
58 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
59 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
61 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
62 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
64 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
65 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
67 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
68 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
70 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
71 additional static suffix to output file names.
73 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
74 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
75 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
77 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
78 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
82 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
83 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
84 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
86 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
87 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
88 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
89 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
90 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
91 typically still point to one of the hard links.
93 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
94 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
95 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
96 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
97 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
99 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
100 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
101 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
102 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
106 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
107 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
108 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
110 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
111 instead of causing a usage failure.
113 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
116 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
120 realpath: print resolved file names.
124 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
125 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
127 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
128 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
130 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
131 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
132 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
133 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
134 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
135 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
137 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
138 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
139 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
141 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
142 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
143 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
145 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
146 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
147 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
148 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
149 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
151 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
153 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
154 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
156 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
157 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
158 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
160 ** Changes in behavior
162 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
163 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
164 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
165 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
166 usually-short referent instead.
168 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
169 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
170 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
171 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
174 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
178 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
179 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
180 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
182 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
183 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
185 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
186 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
190 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
191 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
193 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
194 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
195 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
196 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
198 ** Changes in behavior
200 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
201 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
202 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
206 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
207 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
208 only .tar.xz files is enough.
211 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
215 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
216 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
217 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
219 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
220 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
222 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
223 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
224 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
225 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
226 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
228 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
229 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
230 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
231 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
232 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
233 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
234 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
235 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
237 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
238 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
240 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
241 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
243 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
244 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
246 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
247 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
248 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
250 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
251 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
252 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
253 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
255 ** Changes in behavior
257 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
258 when -v or -c specified.
260 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
261 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
265 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
266 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
267 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
268 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
269 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
271 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
272 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
273 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
275 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
276 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
277 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
278 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
279 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
280 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
281 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
283 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
284 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
285 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
289 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
290 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
292 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
295 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
296 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
298 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
299 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
301 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
302 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
304 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
306 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
310 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
311 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
313 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
316 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
320 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
321 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
323 ** Changes in behavior
325 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
326 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
327 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
328 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
329 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
330 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
332 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
333 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
334 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
338 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
341 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
345 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
346 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
347 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
349 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
350 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
351 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
353 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
354 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
355 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
357 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
358 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
360 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
361 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
363 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
364 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
366 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
367 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
371 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
372 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
373 processed portion thereof.
375 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
376 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
378 ** Changes in behavior
380 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
381 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
382 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
384 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
385 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
386 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
388 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
389 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
391 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
392 Use --preserve-context instead.
394 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
397 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
401 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
402 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
403 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
404 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
405 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
407 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
408 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
410 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
411 reject file names invalid for that file system.
413 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
414 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
418 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
419 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
420 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
421 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
422 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
423 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
424 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
425 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
427 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
428 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
429 the same number of fields are output for each line.
431 ** Changes in behavior
433 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
434 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
435 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
438 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
442 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
443 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
444 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
447 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
451 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
452 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
454 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
455 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
457 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
458 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
460 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
461 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
462 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
463 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
465 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
466 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
468 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
469 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
470 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
472 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
474 ** Changes in behavior
476 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
477 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
478 to the number of available processors.
482 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
485 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
489 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
490 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
491 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
492 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
494 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
495 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
496 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
498 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
499 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
501 ** Changes in behavior
503 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
504 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
506 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
507 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
508 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
509 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
510 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
511 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
513 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
514 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
515 the same way as the others.
518 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
522 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
523 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
524 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
526 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
527 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
529 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
530 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
531 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
533 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
534 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
536 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
537 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
539 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
540 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
541 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
543 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
544 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
545 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
546 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
550 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
551 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
553 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
556 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
557 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
559 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
561 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
562 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
563 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
565 ** Changes in behavior
567 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
568 rather than its aliased target.
570 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
571 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
572 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
574 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
575 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
576 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
577 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
578 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
579 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
580 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
581 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
583 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
585 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
587 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
588 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
591 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
592 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
593 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
594 control like taskset for example.
596 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
598 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
599 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
600 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
601 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
602 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
603 includes %C when context information is available.
605 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
606 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
607 rather than a file system attribute.
609 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
610 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
611 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
612 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
614 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
615 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
616 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
618 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
619 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
620 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
623 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
627 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
628 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
630 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
632 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
633 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
635 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
636 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
637 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
638 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
640 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
641 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
642 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
646 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
647 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
649 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
650 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
651 duration after the initial signal was sent.
653 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
654 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
655 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
656 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
657 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
658 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
659 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
660 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
661 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
663 ** Changes in behavior
665 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
666 sequence when it would be a no-op.
668 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
669 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
672 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
676 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
677 of available processors, which may not have been the case
678 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
679 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
683 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
684 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
686 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
687 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
688 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
689 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
691 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
692 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
693 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
696 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
700 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
701 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
702 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
704 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
705 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
706 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
708 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
709 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
711 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
712 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
713 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
714 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
716 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
717 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
718 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
720 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
721 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
722 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
723 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
725 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
726 renamed-aside and then recreated.
727 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
729 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
730 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
731 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
732 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
734 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
735 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
736 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
738 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
739 processes will not intersperse their output.
740 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
743 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
747 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
748 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
750 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
751 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
753 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
754 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
755 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
756 the presence of the empty string argument.
757 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
759 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
760 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
761 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
762 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
764 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
765 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
767 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
768 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
769 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
771 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
772 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
773 and with a malicious user on the same system
774 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
775 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
778 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
782 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
783 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
784 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
786 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
787 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
788 offending directory and all "contents."
790 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
791 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
792 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
794 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
795 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
796 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
798 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
799 processes will not intersperse their output.
800 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
801 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
803 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
804 output the name of the file to stdout.
805 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
807 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
808 call fails with errno == EACCES.
809 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
811 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
812 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
815 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
816 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
817 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
819 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
820 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
821 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
822 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
823 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
824 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
826 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
827 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
828 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
829 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
831 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
832 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
834 ** Changes in behavior
836 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
837 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
838 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
839 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
840 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
842 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
843 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
844 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
845 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
847 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
849 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
850 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
851 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
852 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
853 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
857 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
861 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
862 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
864 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
865 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
867 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
868 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
869 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
871 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
872 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
875 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
879 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
880 when the source file doesn't have write access.
881 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
883 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
884 to accommodate leap seconds.
885 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
887 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
888 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
889 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
891 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
893 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
894 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
895 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
897 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
898 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
899 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
900 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
901 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
905 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
906 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
907 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
908 directory or a symlink to a directory.
910 ** Changes in behavior
912 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
913 environment variable is set.
915 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
916 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
917 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
921 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
922 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
923 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
924 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
926 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
927 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
928 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
929 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
933 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
934 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
935 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
937 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
938 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
939 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
940 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
941 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
942 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
945 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
946 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
949 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
953 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
954 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
955 and libraries tested at configure time.
956 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
958 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
959 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
961 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
962 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
964 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
965 printing a summary to stderr.
966 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
968 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
969 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
970 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
972 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
973 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
975 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
976 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
977 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
978 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
980 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
981 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
982 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
983 which is relatively unusual.
984 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
986 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
987 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
988 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
989 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
990 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
991 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
992 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
996 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
997 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
998 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
999 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1000 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1004 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1005 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1007 ** Changes in behavior
1009 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1010 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1011 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1012 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1013 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1016 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1020 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1021 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1023 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1024 before data copying has started.
1026 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1027 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1029 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1030 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1031 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1032 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1034 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1035 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1036 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1037 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1039 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1044 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1045 for its standard streams.
1047 ** Changes in behavior
1049 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1050 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1051 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1052 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1053 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1054 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1056 ** Deprecated options
1058 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1059 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1063 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1065 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1066 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1067 a btrfs file system.
1069 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1071 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1072 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1074 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1075 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1078 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1082 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1083 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1084 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1085 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1087 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1088 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1089 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1090 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1091 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1096 make check: two tests have been corrected
1100 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1101 inherited from gnulib.
1104 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1108 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1109 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1110 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1111 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1113 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1114 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1116 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1118 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1119 systems without xattr support.
1121 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1122 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1123 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1125 ** Changes in behavior
1127 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1128 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1129 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1130 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1132 ** Improved robustness
1134 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1135 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1136 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1137 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1138 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1139 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1140 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1141 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1142 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1146 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1147 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1149 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1150 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1151 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1152 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1153 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1156 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1160 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1161 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1162 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1166 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1167 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1168 data was read, or on process exit.
1169 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1171 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1172 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1173 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1174 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1176 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1177 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1178 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1179 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1181 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1182 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1184 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1185 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1187 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1188 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1189 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1191 ** Changes in behavior
1193 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1194 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1195 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1197 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1198 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1200 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1201 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1202 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1205 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1209 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1211 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1212 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1213 install: Never copies xattrs
1215 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1216 from overwriting any existing destination file
1218 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1219 mode where this feature is available.
1221 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1222 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1223 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1224 do not modify the destination at all.
1226 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1228 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1232 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1233 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1235 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1237 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1238 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1240 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1241 processing the first file name
1243 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1244 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1245 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1246 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1248 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1249 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1251 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1252 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1255 ** Changes in behavior
1257 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1258 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1260 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1261 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1262 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1264 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1265 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1267 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1269 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1270 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1271 is still marked with a '+'.
1274 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1278 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1279 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1283 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1284 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1285 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1286 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1287 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1288 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1290 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1291 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1293 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1294 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1296 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1298 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1299 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1300 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1302 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1303 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1305 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1306 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1307 used to factor large numbers.
1309 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1312 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1314 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1316 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1317 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1319 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1320 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1321 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1322 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1324 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1325 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1326 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1328 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1329 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1333 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1335 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1336 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1338 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1339 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1341 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1343 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1344 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1348 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1349 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1350 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1352 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1354 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1355 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1356 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1358 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1359 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1360 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1362 ** Changes in behavior
1364 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1365 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1368 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1372 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1373 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1374 'futimens' system calls.
1378 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1380 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1381 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1382 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1384 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1385 with no USERNAME argument.
1387 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1388 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1389 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1391 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1392 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1393 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1394 number of fields for some inputs.
1396 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1397 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1399 ** Changes in behavior
1401 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1402 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1405 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1409 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1411 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1412 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1413 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1414 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1416 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1417 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1419 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1420 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1422 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1423 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1425 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1426 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1427 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1428 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1430 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1431 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1432 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1433 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1434 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1435 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1437 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1438 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1440 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1441 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1442 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1444 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1445 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1447 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1448 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1450 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1451 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1452 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1453 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1455 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1456 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1458 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1459 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1461 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1462 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1463 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1467 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1468 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1470 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1471 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1472 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1473 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1477 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1478 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1480 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1482 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1486 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1487 which have negative errno values.
1491 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1495 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1499 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1500 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1503 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1507 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1508 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1509 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1511 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1512 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1513 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1514 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1518 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1519 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1520 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1521 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1524 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1528 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1530 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1531 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1532 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1535 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1539 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1540 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1542 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1544 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1546 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1548 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1552 ** Changes in behavior
1554 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1555 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1557 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1558 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1560 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1561 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1562 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1566 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1567 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1568 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1569 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1570 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1571 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1572 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1573 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1574 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1575 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1576 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1578 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1579 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1580 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1583 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1586 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1587 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1588 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1590 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1591 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1592 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1595 ** New build options
1597 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1598 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1599 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1600 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1602 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1603 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1604 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1605 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1606 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1607 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1608 of "make check" fail.
1610 ** Remove deprecated options
1612 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1613 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1614 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1615 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1616 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1618 ** Improved robustness
1620 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1621 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1622 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1623 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1624 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1625 loss of the contents of a/f.
1627 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1628 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1632 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1633 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1634 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1636 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1637 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1638 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1639 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1641 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1642 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1643 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1644 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1645 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1646 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1647 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1648 destination is a symlink.
1650 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1652 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1653 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1655 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1656 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1658 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1660 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1661 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1663 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1664 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1666 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1669 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1670 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1672 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1673 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1675 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1676 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1677 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1678 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1680 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1681 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1682 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1684 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1685 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1686 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1688 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1689 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1690 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1691 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1693 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1694 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1695 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1697 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1698 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1700 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1701 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1703 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1705 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1706 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1707 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1709 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1710 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1712 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1713 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1715 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1716 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1718 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1719 [present in the original version]
1722 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1726 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1728 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1729 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1730 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1732 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1733 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1735 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1739 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1740 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1742 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1743 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1745 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1746 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1748 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1749 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1750 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1751 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1752 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1753 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1755 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1756 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1759 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1760 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1762 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1765 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1766 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1767 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1769 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1770 directory is unreadable.
1772 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1773 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1774 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1776 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1777 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1778 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1779 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1780 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1783 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1784 Before it would print nothing.
1786 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1788 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1789 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1790 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1791 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1792 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1793 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1794 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1795 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1797 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1801 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1802 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1803 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1805 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1806 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1807 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1808 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1811 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1815 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1816 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1817 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1818 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1819 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1820 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1821 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1823 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1824 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1825 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1826 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1827 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1828 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1829 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1830 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1832 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1833 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1834 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1837 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1841 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1842 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1844 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1845 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1846 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1848 ** Improved robustness
1850 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1851 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1852 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1855 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1859 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1860 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1861 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1862 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1863 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1865 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1869 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1872 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1876 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1877 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1878 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1879 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1881 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1882 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1884 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1885 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1886 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1889 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1891 ** Improved robustness
1893 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1894 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1896 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1897 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1898 or NFS-mounted partition.
1900 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1901 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1905 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1906 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1907 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1908 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1909 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1910 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1912 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1913 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1915 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1916 or neglect to report file removal.
1918 For the "groups" command:
1920 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1921 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1923 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1925 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1927 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1931 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1932 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1935 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1937 ** Changes in behavior
1939 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1940 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1941 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1942 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1944 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
1945 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1946 a final './' or '../' component.
1948 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1949 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1950 this only for pipes.
1952 ** Infrastructure changes
1954 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1955 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1956 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1957 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1961 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1962 name is "." or "..".
1964 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1965 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1966 dirent.d_type support.
1968 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1969 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1971 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1972 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1973 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1974 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1977 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1979 ** Changes in behavior
1981 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1985 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1986 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1990 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1991 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1992 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1994 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1995 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1997 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1998 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2000 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2002 ** Improved robustness
2004 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2005 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2006 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2008 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2009 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2012 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2013 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2015 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2016 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2018 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2019 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2021 ** Changes in behavior
2023 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2024 where the two are distinct.
2026 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2027 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2028 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2029 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2030 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2031 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2032 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2033 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2034 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2035 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2036 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2037 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2038 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2039 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2040 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2041 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2042 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2044 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2045 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2046 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2048 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2049 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2050 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2051 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2054 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2055 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2059 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2060 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2061 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2062 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2064 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2065 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2066 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2068 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2069 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2070 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2071 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2072 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2075 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2076 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2078 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2079 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2080 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2081 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2083 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2084 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2085 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2087 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2088 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2089 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2090 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2092 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2093 and sticky) with the -m option.
2095 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2096 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2097 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2098 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2099 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2101 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2102 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2104 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2108 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2109 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2110 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2111 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2113 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2115 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2117 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2118 silently ignoring one of them.
2120 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2121 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2122 containing this change was 5.92.
2124 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2125 automatically newline terminated.
2127 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2128 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2129 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2130 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2133 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2134 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2135 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2138 ** Scheduled for removal
2140 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2141 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2143 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2144 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2145 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2146 command to unlink a directory.
2148 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2149 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2150 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2151 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2155 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2156 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2157 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2158 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2159 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2160 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2164 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2165 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2167 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2169 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2170 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2171 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2173 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2174 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2177 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2178 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2180 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2181 list directories before files.
2183 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2184 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2185 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2186 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2189 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2191 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2193 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2194 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2195 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2197 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2198 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2202 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2203 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2204 usually printing nothing.
2206 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2208 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2209 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2210 them with hard-linked directories.
2212 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2213 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2214 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2216 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2217 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2218 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2220 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2223 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2224 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2226 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2227 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2229 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2230 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2232 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2233 all command-line arguments.
2235 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2237 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2239 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2240 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2242 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2244 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2245 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2246 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2247 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2248 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2250 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2251 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2253 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2254 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2255 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2256 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2258 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2260 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2264 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2265 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2267 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2268 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2270 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2271 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2273 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2274 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2276 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2277 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2279 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2281 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2282 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2283 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2286 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2288 ** Build-related bug fixes
2290 installing .mo files would fail
2293 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2297 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2299 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2302 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2306 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2307 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2311 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2313 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2314 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2316 ** Deprecated options
2318 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2319 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2321 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2325 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2327 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2328 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2329 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2330 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2332 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2335 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2341 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2346 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2348 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2350 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2351 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2352 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2354 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2355 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2356 problematic usages. These include:
2358 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2359 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2360 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2361 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2362 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2363 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2364 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2365 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2366 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2368 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2369 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2371 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2372 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2373 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2374 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2376 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2377 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2378 between binary and text files.
2380 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2384 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2388 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2389 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2391 head tac tail tee tr
2392 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2394 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2395 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2397 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2398 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2399 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2401 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2403 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2405 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2406 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2407 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2411 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2413 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2414 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2416 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2417 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2418 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2422 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2423 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2427 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2428 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2429 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2433 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2434 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2438 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2440 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2442 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2446 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2447 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2448 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2450 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2451 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2452 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2453 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2454 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2456 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2460 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2461 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2462 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2464 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2466 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2467 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2468 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2469 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2471 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2473 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2474 rather than silently wrapping around.
2476 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2477 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2479 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2480 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2482 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2483 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2484 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2485 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2487 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2489 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2491 ** Improved robustness
2493 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2494 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2495 no matter how large the result.
2497 ** Improved portability
2499 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2500 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2502 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2504 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2505 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2506 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2508 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2509 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2513 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2514 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2516 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2518 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2519 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2520 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2521 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2523 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2524 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2526 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2527 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2528 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2530 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2532 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2533 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2535 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2536 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2538 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2540 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2541 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2543 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2544 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2546 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2547 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2548 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2550 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2552 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2554 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2558 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2560 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2561 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2562 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2564 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2565 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2567 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2568 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2569 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2571 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2572 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2574 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2575 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2576 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2577 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2579 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2580 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2582 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2583 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2584 the file system does not support it.
2586 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2588 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2589 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2591 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2593 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2594 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2596 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2597 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2598 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2599 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2601 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2602 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2605 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2606 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2607 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2608 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2610 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2611 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2612 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2613 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2615 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2616 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2618 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2620 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2621 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2622 reporting incorrect results.
2626 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2627 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2629 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2632 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2634 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2635 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2637 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2638 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2640 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2643 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2644 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2645 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2646 the file name does not look like a page range.
2648 printf has several changes:
2650 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2651 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2653 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2654 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2655 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2657 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2658 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2661 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2662 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2664 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2665 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2667 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2669 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2670 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2672 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2674 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2676 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2677 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2678 when first encountering the directory.
2682 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2683 output; POSIX requires this.
2685 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2686 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2688 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2690 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2691 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2693 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2694 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2696 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2697 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2698 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2699 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2700 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2701 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2702 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2704 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2705 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2706 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2708 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2709 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2711 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2713 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2715 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2716 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2717 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2718 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2720 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2724 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2725 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2726 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2727 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
2728 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
2730 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2731 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2732 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2734 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2735 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2737 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2738 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2740 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2741 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2742 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2743 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2744 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2746 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2747 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2749 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2750 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2752 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2754 nocreat do not create the output file
2755 excl fail if the output file already exists
2756 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2757 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2759 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2761 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2762 direct use direct I/O for data
2763 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2764 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2765 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2766 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2767 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2769 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2771 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2772 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
2775 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2776 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2777 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2778 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2779 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2780 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2782 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2783 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2785 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2788 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2790 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2792 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2793 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2795 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2796 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2797 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2799 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2800 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2801 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2803 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2805 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2806 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2808 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2809 for compatibility with bash.
2811 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2813 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2814 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2815 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2816 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2818 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2819 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2821 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2822 ls supports TABSIZE.
2823 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2824 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2825 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2827 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2830 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2832 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2833 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2834 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2835 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2836 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2837 an offset, not as a file name.
2839 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2840 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2842 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2843 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2845 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2846 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2848 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2849 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2850 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2852 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2853 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2855 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2856 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2860 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2862 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2864 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2868 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2869 or more arguments between partitions.
2871 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2872 holes in the destination.
2874 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2875 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2876 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2877 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2878 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2879 terminates immediately.
2881 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2883 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2885 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2886 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2887 not the empty string.
2889 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2890 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2894 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2895 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2896 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
2899 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2906 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2910 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2911 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
2913 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2914 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2916 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2917 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2918 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2921 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2925 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2926 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2928 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2929 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2931 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2932 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2933 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2935 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2937 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2940 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2942 ** Configuration option
2944 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2945 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2949 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2950 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2954 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2955 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2956 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2959 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2960 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2961 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2962 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2963 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2964 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2965 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2968 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2972 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2973 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2974 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2976 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2977 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2979 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2981 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2982 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2983 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2984 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2986 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2988 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2989 not just the ones that reference directories
2991 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2992 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2994 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2995 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2996 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2998 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2999 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3000 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3001 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3002 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3003 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3005 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3010 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3011 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3013 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3015 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3017 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3019 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3020 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3022 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3023 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3025 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3027 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3031 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3033 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3035 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3036 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3037 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3038 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3039 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3041 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3042 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3044 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3045 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3047 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3048 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3050 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3051 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3052 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3056 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3057 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3058 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3059 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3060 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3061 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3062 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3063 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3064 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3065 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3066 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3067 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3068 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3069 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3071 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3073 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3074 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3076 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3078 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3080 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3081 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3083 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3085 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3086 without a trailing newline.
3088 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3089 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3091 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3094 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3098 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3100 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3102 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3103 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3104 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3105 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3107 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3109 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3110 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3111 be printed without leading spaces.
3113 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3114 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3119 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3120 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3121 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3123 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3125 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3126 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3128 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3129 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3131 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3132 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3134 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3136 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3138 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3140 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3141 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3143 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3145 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3147 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3148 byte offsets are specified.
3151 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3154 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3157 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3158 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3159 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3160 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3161 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3162 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3163 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3164 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3165 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3166 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3167 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3168 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3169 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3170 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3171 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3172 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3173 directory where M has write access.
3174 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3175 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3176 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3179 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3180 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3181 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3182 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3183 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3184 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3185 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3186 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3187 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3188 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3189 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3190 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3191 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3192 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3193 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3194 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3195 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3196 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3197 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3198 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3199 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3200 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3201 appeared one additional time.
3203 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3204 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3205 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3206 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3209 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3210 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3211 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3212 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3213 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3214 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3215 if there were more than 338.
3217 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3218 - false --help now exits nonzero
3221 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3222 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3223 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3224 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3227 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3228 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3229 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3230 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3231 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3234 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3235 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3236 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3237 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3238 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3239 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3240 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3243 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3244 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3245 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3246 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3247 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3248 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3250 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3251 under certain unusual conditions
3252 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3253 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3256 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3257 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3258 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3259 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3260 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3261 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3262 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3263 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3264 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3265 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3266 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3267 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3268 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3269 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3270 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3271 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3274 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3275 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3278 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3279 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3280 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3281 involving hard-linked directories
3282 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3283 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3284 character-special and block files
3287 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3288 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3289 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3290 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3291 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3292 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3293 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3294 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3295 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3297 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3298 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3299 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3300 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3301 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3302 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3303 specified on the command line.
3304 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3305 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3306 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3307 the first file untouched.
3308 * readlink: new program
3309 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3310 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3311 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3312 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3313 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3314 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3317 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3318 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3319 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3320 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3321 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3322 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3323 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3324 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3325 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3326 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3327 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3328 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3330 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3331 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3332 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3334 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3335 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3336 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3337 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3338 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3339 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3340 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3341 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3344 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3345 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3348 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3349 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3350 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3351 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3352 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3353 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3354 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3357 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3358 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3360 ========================================================================
3361 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3362 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3365 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3367 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3368 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3369 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3370 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3371 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3372 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3373 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3374 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3375 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3376 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3377 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3378 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3380 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3381 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3382 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3383 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3385 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3388 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3390 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3391 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3392 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3393 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3394 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3395 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3396 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3399 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3400 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3401 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3402 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3403 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3404 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3405 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3406 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3407 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3408 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3409 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3410 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3411 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3412 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3413 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3414 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3416 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3417 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3419 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3420 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3421 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3422 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3423 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3424 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3426 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3427 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3428 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3429 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3430 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3431 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3432 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3434 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3435 the source files in the following example:
3436 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3437 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3438 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3439 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3440 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3441 links between source files with --preserve=links
3442 * cp accepts new options:
3443 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3444 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3445 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3446 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3447 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3448 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3449 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3450 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3451 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3453 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3454 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3455 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3456 even though it's older than dest.
3457 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3458 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3459 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3460 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3461 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3463 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3464 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3465 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3466 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3467 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3468 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3469 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3471 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3472 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3473 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3475 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3476 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3477 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3478 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3479 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3480 This is the default.
3482 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3483 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3484 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3485 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3486 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3488 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3491 ========================================================================
3492 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3493 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3496 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3497 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3499 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3500 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3501 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3502 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3503 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3505 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3506 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3507 that specifies a non-directory
3510 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3511 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3512 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3513 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3514 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3515 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3516 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3517 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3518 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3519 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3520 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3521 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3522 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3523 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3524 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3525 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3526 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3527 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3528 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3529 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3530 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3531 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3532 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3533 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3535 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3536 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3537 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3539 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3541 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3542 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3544 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3545 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3546 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3547 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3548 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3550 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3551 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3552 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3553 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3554 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3556 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3558 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3559 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3560 * still more portability fixes
3561 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3562 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3564 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3566 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3568 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3570 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3571 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3572 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3573 there is any time remaining
3574 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3576 ========================================================================
3577 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3578 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3580 This package began as the union of the following:
3581 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3583 ========================================================================
3585 Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3587 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3588 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3589 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3590 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3591 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3592 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.