1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
8 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
9 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
10 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
11 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
13 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
14 reject file names invalid for that file system.
16 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
19 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
23 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
24 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
25 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
28 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
32 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
33 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
35 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
36 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
38 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
39 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
41 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
42 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
43 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
44 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
46 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
47 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
49 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
50 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
51 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
53 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
55 ** Changes in behavior
57 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
58 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
59 to the number of available processors.
63 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
66 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
70 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
71 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
72 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
73 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
75 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
76 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
77 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
79 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
80 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
82 ** Changes in behavior
84 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
85 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
87 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
88 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
89 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
90 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
91 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
92 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
94 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
95 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
96 the same way as the others.
99 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
103 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
104 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
105 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
107 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
108 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
110 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
111 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
112 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
114 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
115 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
117 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
118 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
120 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
121 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
122 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
124 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
125 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
126 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
127 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
131 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
132 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
134 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
137 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
138 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
140 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
142 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
143 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
144 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
146 ** Changes in behavior
148 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
149 rather than its aliased target.
151 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
152 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
153 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
155 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
156 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
157 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
158 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
159 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
160 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
161 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
162 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
164 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
166 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
168 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
169 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
172 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
173 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
174 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
175 control like taskset for example.
177 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
179 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
180 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
181 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
182 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
183 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
184 includes %C when context information is available.
186 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
187 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
188 rather than a file system attribute.
190 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
191 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
192 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
193 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
195 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
196 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
197 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
199 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
200 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
201 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
204 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
208 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
209 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
211 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
213 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
214 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
216 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
217 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
218 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
219 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
221 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
222 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
223 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
227 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
228 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
230 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
231 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
232 duration after the initial signal was sent.
234 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
235 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
236 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
237 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
238 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
239 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
240 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
241 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
242 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
244 ** Changes in behavior
246 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
247 sequence when it would be a no-op.
249 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
250 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
253 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
257 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
258 of available processors, which may not have been the case
259 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
260 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
264 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
265 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
267 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
268 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
269 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
270 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
272 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
273 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
274 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
277 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
281 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
282 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
283 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
285 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
286 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
287 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
289 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
290 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
292 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
293 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
294 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
295 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
297 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
298 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
299 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
301 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
302 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
303 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
304 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
306 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
307 renamed-aside and then recreated.
308 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
310 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
311 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
312 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
313 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
315 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
316 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
317 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
319 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
320 processes will not intersperse their output.
321 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
324 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
328 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
329 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
331 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
332 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
334 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
335 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
336 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
337 the presence of the empty string argument.
338 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
340 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
341 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
342 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
343 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
345 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
346 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
348 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
349 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
350 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
352 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
353 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
354 and with a malicious user on the same system
355 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
356 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
359 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
363 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
364 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
365 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
367 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
368 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
369 offending directory and all "contents."
371 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
372 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
373 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
375 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
376 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
377 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
379 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
380 processes will not intersperse their output.
381 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
382 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
384 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
385 output the name of the file to stdout.
386 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
388 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
389 call fails with errno == EACCES.
390 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
392 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
393 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
396 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
397 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
398 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
400 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
401 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
402 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
403 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
404 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
405 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
407 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
408 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
409 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
410 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
412 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
413 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
415 ** Changes in behavior
417 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
418 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
419 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
420 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
421 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
423 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
424 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
425 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
426 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
428 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
430 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
431 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
432 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
433 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
434 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
438 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
442 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
443 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
445 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
446 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
448 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
449 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
450 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
452 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
453 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
456 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
460 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
461 when the source file doesn't have write access.
462 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
464 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
465 to accommodate leap seconds.
466 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
468 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
469 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
470 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
472 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
474 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
475 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
476 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
478 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
479 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
480 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
481 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
482 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
486 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
487 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
488 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
489 directory or a symlink to a directory.
491 ** Changes in behavior
493 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
494 environment variable is set.
496 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
497 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
498 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
502 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
503 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
504 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
505 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
507 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
508 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
509 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
510 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
514 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
515 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
516 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
518 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
519 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
520 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
521 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
522 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
523 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
526 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
527 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
530 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
534 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
535 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
536 and libraries tested at configure time.
537 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
539 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
540 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
542 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
543 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
545 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
546 printing a summary to stderr.
547 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
549 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
550 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
551 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
553 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
554 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
556 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
557 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
558 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
559 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
561 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
562 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
563 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
564 which is relatively unusual.
565 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
567 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
568 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
569 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
570 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
571 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
572 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
573 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
577 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
578 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
579 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
580 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
581 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
585 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
586 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
588 ** Changes in behavior
590 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
591 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
592 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
593 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
594 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
597 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
601 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
602 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
604 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
605 before data copying has started.
607 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
608 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
610 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
611 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
612 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
613 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
615 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
616 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
617 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
618 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
620 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
625 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
626 for its standard streams.
628 ** Changes in behavior
630 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
631 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
632 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
633 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
634 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
635 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
637 ** Deprecated options
639 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
640 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
644 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
646 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
647 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
650 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
652 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
653 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
655 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
656 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
659 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
663 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
664 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
665 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
666 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
668 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
669 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
670 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
671 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
672 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
677 make check: two tests have been corrected
681 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
682 inherited from gnulib.
685 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
689 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
690 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
691 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
692 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
694 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
695 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
697 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
699 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
700 systems without xattr support.
702 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
703 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
704 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
706 ** Changes in behavior
708 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
709 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
710 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
711 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
713 ** Improved robustness
715 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
716 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
717 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
718 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
719 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
720 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
721 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
722 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
723 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
727 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
728 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
730 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
731 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
732 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
733 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
734 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
737 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
741 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
742 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
743 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
747 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
748 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
749 data was read, or on process exit.
750 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
752 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
753 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
754 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
755 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
757 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
758 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
759 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
760 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
762 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
763 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
765 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
766 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
768 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
769 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
770 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
772 ** Changes in behavior
774 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
775 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
776 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
778 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
779 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
781 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
782 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
783 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
786 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
790 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
792 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
793 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
794 install: Never copies xattrs
796 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
797 from overwriting any existing destination file
799 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
800 mode where this feature is available.
802 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
803 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
804 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
805 do not modify the destination at all.
807 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
809 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
813 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
814 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
816 cp uses much less memory in some situations
818 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
819 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
821 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
822 processing the first file name
824 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
825 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
826 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
827 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
829 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
830 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
832 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
833 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
836 ** Changes in behavior
838 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
839 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
841 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
842 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
843 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
845 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
846 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
848 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
850 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
851 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
852 is still marked with a '+'.
855 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
859 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
860 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
864 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
865 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
866 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
867 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
868 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
869 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
871 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
872 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
874 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
875 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
877 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
879 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
880 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
881 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
883 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
884 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
886 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
887 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
888 used to factor large numbers.
890 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
893 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
895 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
897 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
898 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
900 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
901 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
902 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
903 maximum command-line (argv) length.
905 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
906 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
907 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
909 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
910 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
914 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
916 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
917 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
919 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
920 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
922 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
924 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
925 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
929 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
930 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
931 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
933 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
935 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
936 no matter how many files are in a given directory
938 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
939 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
940 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
942 ** Changes in behavior
944 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
945 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
948 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
952 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
954 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
955 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
956 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
958 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
959 with no USERNAME argument.
961 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
962 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
963 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
965 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
966 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
967 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
968 number of fields for some inputs.
970 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
971 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
973 ** Changes in behavior
975 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
976 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
979 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
983 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
985 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
986 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
987 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
988 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
990 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
991 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
993 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
994 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
996 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
997 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
999 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1000 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1001 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1002 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1004 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1005 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1006 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1007 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1008 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1009 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1011 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1012 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1014 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1015 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1016 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1018 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1019 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1021 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1022 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1024 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1025 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1026 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1027 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1029 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1030 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1032 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1033 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1035 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1036 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1037 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1041 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1042 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1044 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1045 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1046 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1047 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1051 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1052 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1054 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1056 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1060 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1061 which have negative errno values.
1065 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1069 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1073 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1074 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1077 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1081 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1082 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1083 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1085 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1086 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1087 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1088 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1092 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1093 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1094 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1095 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1098 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1102 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1104 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1105 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1106 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1109 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1113 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1114 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1116 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1118 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1120 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1122 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1126 ** Changes in behavior
1128 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1129 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1131 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1132 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1134 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1135 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1136 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1140 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1141 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1142 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1143 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1144 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1145 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1146 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1147 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1148 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1149 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1150 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1152 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1153 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1154 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1157 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1160 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1161 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1162 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1164 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1165 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1166 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1169 ** New build options
1171 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1172 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1173 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1174 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1176 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1177 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1178 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1179 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1180 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1181 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1182 of "make check" fail.
1184 ** Remove deprecated options
1186 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1187 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1188 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1189 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1190 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1192 ** Improved robustness
1194 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1195 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1196 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1197 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1198 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1199 loss of the contents of a/f.
1201 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1202 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1206 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1207 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1208 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1210 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1211 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1212 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1213 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1215 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1216 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1217 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1218 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1219 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1220 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1221 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1222 destination is a symlink.
1224 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1226 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1227 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1229 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1230 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1232 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1234 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1235 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1237 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1238 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1240 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1243 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1244 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1246 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1247 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1249 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1250 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1251 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1252 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1254 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1255 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1256 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1258 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1259 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1260 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1262 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1263 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1264 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1265 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1267 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1268 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1269 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1271 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1272 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1274 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1275 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1277 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1279 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1280 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1281 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1283 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1284 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1286 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1287 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1289 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1290 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1292 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1293 [present in the original version]
1296 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1300 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1302 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1303 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1304 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1306 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1307 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1309 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1313 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1314 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1316 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1317 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1319 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1320 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1322 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1323 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1324 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1325 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1326 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1327 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1329 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1330 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1333 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1334 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1336 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1339 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1340 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1341 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1343 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1344 directory is unreadable.
1346 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1347 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1348 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1350 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1351 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1352 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1353 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1354 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1357 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1358 Before it would print nothing.
1360 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1362 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1363 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1364 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1365 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1366 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1367 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1368 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1369 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1371 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1375 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1376 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1377 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1379 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1380 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1381 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1382 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1385 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1389 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1390 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1391 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1392 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1393 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1394 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1395 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1397 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1398 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1399 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1400 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1401 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1402 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1403 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1404 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1406 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1407 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1408 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1411 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1415 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1416 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1418 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1419 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1420 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1422 ** Improved robustness
1424 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1425 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1426 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1429 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1433 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1434 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1435 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1436 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1437 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1439 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1443 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1446 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1450 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1451 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1452 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1453 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1455 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1456 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1458 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1459 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1460 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1463 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1465 ** Improved robustness
1467 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1468 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1470 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1471 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1472 or NFS-mounted partition.
1474 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1475 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1479 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1480 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1481 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1482 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1483 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1484 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1486 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1487 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1489 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1490 or neglect to report file removal.
1492 For the "groups" command:
1494 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1495 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1497 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1499 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1501 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1505 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1506 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1509 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1511 ** Changes in behavior
1513 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1514 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1515 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1516 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1518 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1519 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1520 a final `./' or `../' component.
1522 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1523 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1524 this only for pipes.
1526 ** Infrastructure changes
1528 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1529 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1530 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1531 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1535 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1536 name is "." or "..".
1538 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1539 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1540 dirent.d_type support.
1542 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1543 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1545 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1546 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1547 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1548 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1551 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1553 ** Changes in behavior
1555 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1559 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1560 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1564 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1565 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1566 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1568 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1569 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1571 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1572 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1574 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1576 ** Improved robustness
1578 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1579 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1580 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1582 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1583 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1586 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1587 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1589 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1590 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1592 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1593 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1595 ** Changes in behavior
1597 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1598 where the two are distinct.
1600 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1601 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1602 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1603 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1604 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1605 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1606 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1607 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1608 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1609 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1610 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1611 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1612 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1613 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1614 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1615 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1616 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1618 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1619 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1620 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1622 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1623 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1624 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1625 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1628 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1629 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1633 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1634 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1635 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1636 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1638 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1639 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1640 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1642 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1643 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1644 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1645 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1646 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1649 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1650 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1652 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1653 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1654 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1655 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1657 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1658 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1659 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1661 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1662 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1663 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1664 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1666 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1667 and sticky) with the -m option.
1669 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1670 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1671 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1672 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1673 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1675 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1676 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1678 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1682 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1683 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1684 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1685 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1687 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1689 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1691 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1692 silently ignoring one of them.
1694 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1695 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1696 containing this change was 5.92.
1698 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1699 automatically newline terminated.
1701 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1702 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1703 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1704 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1707 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1708 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1709 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1712 ** Scheduled for removal
1714 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1715 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1717 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1718 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1719 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1720 command to unlink a directory.
1722 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1723 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1724 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1725 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1729 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1730 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1731 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1732 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1733 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1734 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1738 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1739 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1741 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1743 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1744 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1745 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1747 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1748 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1751 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1752 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1754 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1755 list directories before files.
1757 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1758 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1759 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1760 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1763 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1765 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1767 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1768 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1769 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1771 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1772 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1776 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1777 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1778 usually printing nothing.
1780 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1782 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1783 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1784 them with hard-linked directories.
1786 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1787 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1788 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1790 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1791 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1792 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1794 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1797 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1798 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1800 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1801 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1803 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1804 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1806 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1807 all command-line arguments.
1809 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1811 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1813 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1814 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1816 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1818 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1819 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1820 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1821 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1822 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1824 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1825 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1827 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1828 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1829 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1830 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1832 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1834 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1838 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1839 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1841 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1842 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1844 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1845 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1847 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1848 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1850 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1851 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1853 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1855 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1856 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1857 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1860 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1862 ** Build-related bug fixes
1864 installing .mo files would fail
1867 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1871 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1873 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1876 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1880 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1881 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1885 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1887 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1888 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1890 ** Deprecated options
1892 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1893 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1895 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1899 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1901 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1902 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1903 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1904 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1906 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1909 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1915 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1920 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1922 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1924 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1925 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1926 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1928 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1929 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1930 problematic usages. These include:
1932 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1933 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1934 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1935 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1936 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1937 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1938 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1939 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1940 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1942 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1943 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1945 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1946 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1947 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1948 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1950 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1951 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1952 between binary and text files.
1954 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1958 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1962 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1963 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1965 head tac tail tee tr
1966 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1968 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1969 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1971 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1972 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1973 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1975 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1977 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1979 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1980 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1981 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1985 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1987 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1988 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1990 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1991 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1992 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1996 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1997 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2001 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2002 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2003 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2007 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2008 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2012 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2014 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2016 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2020 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2021 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2022 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2024 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2025 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2026 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2027 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2028 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2030 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2034 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2035 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2036 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2038 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2040 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2041 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2042 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2043 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2045 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2047 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2048 rather than silently wrapping around.
2050 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2051 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2053 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2054 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2056 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2057 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2058 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2059 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2061 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2063 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2065 ** Improved robustness
2067 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2068 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2069 no matter how large the result.
2071 ** Improved portability
2073 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2074 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2076 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2078 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2079 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2080 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2082 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2083 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2087 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2088 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2090 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2092 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2093 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2094 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2095 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2097 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2098 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2100 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2101 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2102 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2104 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2106 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2107 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2109 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2110 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2112 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2114 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2115 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2117 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2118 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2120 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2121 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2122 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2124 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2126 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2128 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2132 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2134 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2135 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2136 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2138 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2139 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2141 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2142 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2143 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2145 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2146 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2148 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2149 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2150 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2151 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2153 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2154 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2156 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2157 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2158 the file system does not support it.
2160 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2162 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2163 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2165 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2167 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2168 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2170 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2171 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2172 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2173 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2175 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2176 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2179 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2180 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2181 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2182 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2184 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2185 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2186 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2187 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2189 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2190 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2192 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2194 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2195 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2196 reporting incorrect results.
2200 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2201 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2203 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2206 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2208 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2209 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2211 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2212 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2214 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2217 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2218 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2219 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2220 the file name does not look like a page range.
2222 printf has several changes:
2224 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2225 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2227 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2228 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2229 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2231 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2232 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2235 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2236 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2238 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2239 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2241 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2243 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2244 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2246 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2248 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2250 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2251 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2252 when first encountering the directory.
2256 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2257 output; POSIX requires this.
2259 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2260 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2262 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2264 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2265 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2267 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2268 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2270 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2271 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2272 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2273 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2274 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2275 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2276 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2278 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2279 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2280 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2282 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2283 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2285 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2287 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2289 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2290 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2291 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2292 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2294 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2298 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2299 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2300 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2301 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2302 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2304 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2305 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2306 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2308 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2309 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2311 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2312 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2314 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2315 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2316 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2317 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2318 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2320 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2321 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2323 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2324 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2326 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2328 nocreat do not create the output file
2329 excl fail if the output file already exists
2330 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2331 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2333 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2335 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2336 direct use direct I/O for data
2337 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2338 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2339 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2340 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2341 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2343 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2345 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2346 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2349 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2350 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2351 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2352 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2353 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2354 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2356 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2357 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2359 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2362 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2364 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2366 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2367 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2369 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2370 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2371 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2373 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2374 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2375 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2377 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2379 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2380 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2382 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2383 for compatibility with bash.
2385 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2387 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2388 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2389 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2390 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2392 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2393 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2395 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2396 ls supports TABSIZE.
2397 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2398 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2399 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2401 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2404 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2406 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2407 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2408 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2409 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2410 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2411 an offset, not as a file name.
2413 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2414 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2416 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2417 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2419 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2420 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2422 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2423 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2424 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2426 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2427 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2429 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2430 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2434 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2436 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2438 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2442 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2443 or more arguments between partitions.
2445 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2446 holes in the destination.
2448 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2449 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2450 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2451 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2452 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2453 terminates immediately.
2455 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2457 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2459 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2460 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2461 not the empty string.
2463 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2464 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2468 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2469 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2470 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2473 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2480 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2484 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2485 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2487 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2488 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2490 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2491 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2492 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2495 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2499 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2500 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2502 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2503 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2505 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2506 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2507 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2509 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2511 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2514 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2516 ** Configuration option
2518 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2519 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2523 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2524 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2528 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2529 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2530 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2533 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2534 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2535 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2536 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2537 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2538 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2539 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2542 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2546 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2547 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2548 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2550 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2551 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2553 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2555 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2556 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2557 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2558 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2560 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2562 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2563 not just the ones that reference directories
2565 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2566 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2568 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2569 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2570 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2572 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2573 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2574 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2575 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2576 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2577 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2579 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2584 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2585 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2587 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2589 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2591 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2593 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2594 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2596 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2597 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2599 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2601 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2605 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2607 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2609 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2610 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2611 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2612 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2613 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2615 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2616 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2618 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2619 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2621 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2622 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2624 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2625 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2626 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2630 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2631 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2632 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2633 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2634 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2635 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2636 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2637 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2638 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2639 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2640 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2641 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2642 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2643 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2645 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2647 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2648 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2650 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2652 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2654 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2655 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2657 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2659 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2660 without a trailing newline.
2662 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2663 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2665 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2668 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2672 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2674 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2676 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2677 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2678 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2679 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2681 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2683 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2684 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2685 be printed without leading spaces.
2687 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2688 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2693 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2694 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2695 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2697 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2699 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2700 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2702 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2703 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2705 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2706 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2708 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2710 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2712 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2714 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2715 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2717 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2719 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2721 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2722 byte offsets are specified.
2725 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2728 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2731 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2732 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2733 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2734 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2735 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2736 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2737 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2738 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2739 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2740 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2741 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2742 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2743 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2744 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2745 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2746 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2747 directory where M has write access.
2748 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2749 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2750 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2753 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2754 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2755 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2756 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2757 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2758 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2759 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2760 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2761 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2762 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2763 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2764 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2765 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2766 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2767 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2768 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2769 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2770 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2771 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2772 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2773 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2774 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2775 appeared one additional time.
2777 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2778 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2779 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2780 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2783 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2784 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2785 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2786 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2787 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2788 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2789 if there were more than 338.
2791 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2792 - false --help now exits nonzero
2795 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2796 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2797 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2798 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2801 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2802 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2803 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2804 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2805 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2808 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2809 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2810 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2811 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2812 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2813 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2814 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2817 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2818 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2819 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2820 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2821 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2822 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2824 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2825 under certain unusual conditions
2826 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2827 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2830 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2831 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2832 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2833 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2834 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2835 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2836 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2837 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2838 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2839 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2840 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2841 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2842 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2843 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2844 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2845 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2848 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2849 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2852 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2853 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2854 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2855 involving hard-linked directories
2856 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2857 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2858 character-special and block files
2861 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2862 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2863 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2864 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2865 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2866 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2867 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2868 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2869 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2871 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2872 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2873 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2874 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2875 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2876 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2877 specified on the command line.
2878 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2879 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2880 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2881 the first file untouched.
2882 * readlink: new program
2883 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2884 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2885 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2886 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2887 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2888 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2891 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2892 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2893 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2894 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2895 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2896 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2897 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2898 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2899 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2900 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2901 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2902 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2904 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2905 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2906 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2908 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2909 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2910 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2911 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2912 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2913 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2914 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2915 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2918 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2919 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2922 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2923 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2924 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2925 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2926 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2927 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2928 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2931 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2932 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2934 ========================================================================
2935 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2936 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2939 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2941 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2942 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2943 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2944 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2945 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2946 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2947 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2948 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2949 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2950 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2951 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2952 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2954 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2955 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2956 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2957 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2959 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2962 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2964 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2965 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2966 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2967 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2968 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2969 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2970 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2973 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2974 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2975 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2976 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2977 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2978 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2979 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2980 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2981 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2982 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2983 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2984 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2985 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2986 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2987 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2988 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2990 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2991 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2993 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2994 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2995 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2996 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2997 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2998 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3000 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3001 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3002 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3003 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3004 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3005 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3006 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3008 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3009 the source files in the following example:
3010 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3011 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3012 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3013 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3014 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3015 links between source files with --preserve=links
3016 * cp accepts new options:
3017 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3018 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3019 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3020 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3021 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3022 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3023 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3024 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3025 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3027 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3028 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3029 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3030 even though it's older than dest.
3031 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3032 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3033 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3034 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3035 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3037 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3038 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3039 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3040 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3041 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3042 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3043 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3045 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3046 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3047 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3049 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3050 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3051 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3052 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3053 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3054 This is the default.
3056 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3057 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3058 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3059 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3060 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3062 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3065 ========================================================================
3066 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3067 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3070 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3071 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3073 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3074 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3075 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3076 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3077 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3079 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3080 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3081 that specifies a non-directory
3084 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3085 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3086 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3087 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3088 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3089 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3090 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3091 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3092 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3093 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3094 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3095 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3096 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3097 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3098 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3099 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3100 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3101 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3102 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3103 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3104 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3105 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3106 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3107 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3109 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3110 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3111 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3113 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3115 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3116 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3118 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3119 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3120 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3121 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3122 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3124 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3125 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3126 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3127 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3128 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3130 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3132 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3133 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3134 * still more portability fixes
3135 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3136 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3138 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3140 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3142 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3144 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3145 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3146 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3147 there is any time remaining
3148 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3150 ========================================================================
3151 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3152 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3154 This package began as the union of the following:
3155 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3157 ========================================================================
3159 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3161 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3162 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3163 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3164 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3165 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3166 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.