1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
8 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
9 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
11 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
12 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
14 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
15 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
16 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
18 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
19 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
21 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
22 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
23 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
24 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
28 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
29 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
31 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
34 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
35 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
37 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
39 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
40 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
41 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
43 ** Changes in behavior
45 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
46 rather than its aliased target.
48 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
49 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
50 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
52 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
53 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
54 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
55 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
56 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
57 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
58 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
59 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
61 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
63 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
65 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
66 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
69 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
70 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
71 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
72 control like taskset for example.
74 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
75 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
76 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning.
78 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
79 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
80 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
82 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
83 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
84 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
87 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
91 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
92 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
94 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
96 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
97 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
99 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
100 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
101 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
102 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
104 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
105 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
106 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
110 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
111 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
113 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
114 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
115 duration after the initial signal was sent.
117 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
118 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
119 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
120 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
121 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
122 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
123 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
124 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
125 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
127 ** Changes in behavior
129 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
130 sequence when it would be a no-op.
132 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
133 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
136 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
140 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
141 of available processors, which may not have been the case
142 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
143 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
147 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
148 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
150 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
151 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
152 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
153 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
155 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
156 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
157 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
160 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
164 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
165 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
166 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
168 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
169 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
170 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
172 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
173 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
175 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
176 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
177 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
178 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
180 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
181 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
182 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
184 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
185 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
186 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
187 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
189 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
190 renamed-aside and then recreated.
191 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
193 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
194 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
195 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
196 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
198 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
199 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
200 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
202 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
203 processes will not intersperse their output.
204 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
207 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
211 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
212 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
214 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
215 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
217 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
218 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
219 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
220 the presence of the empty string argument.
221 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
223 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
224 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
225 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
226 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
228 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
229 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
231 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
232 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
233 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
235 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
236 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
237 and with a malicious user on the same system
238 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
239 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
242 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
246 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
247 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
248 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
250 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
251 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
252 offending directory and all "contents."
254 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
255 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
256 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
258 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
259 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
260 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
262 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
263 processes will not intersperse their output.
264 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
265 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
267 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
268 output the name of the file to stdout.
269 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
271 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
272 call fails with errno == EACCES.
273 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
275 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
276 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
279 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
280 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
281 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
283 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
284 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
285 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
286 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
287 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
288 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
290 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
291 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
292 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
293 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
295 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
296 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
298 ** Changes in behavior
300 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
301 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
302 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
303 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
304 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
306 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
307 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
308 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
309 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
311 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
313 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
314 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
315 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
316 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
317 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
321 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
325 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
326 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
328 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
329 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
331 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
332 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
333 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
335 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
336 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
339 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
343 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
344 when the source file doesn't have write access.
345 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
347 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
348 to accommodate leap seconds.
349 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
351 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
352 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
353 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
355 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
357 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
358 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
359 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
361 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
362 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
363 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
364 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
365 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
369 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
370 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
371 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
372 directory or a symlink to a directory.
374 ** Changes in behavior
376 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
377 environment variable is set.
379 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
380 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
381 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
385 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
386 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
387 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
388 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
390 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
391 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
392 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
393 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
397 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
398 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
399 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
401 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
402 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
403 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
404 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
405 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
406 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
409 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
410 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
413 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
417 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
418 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
419 and libraries tested at configure time.
420 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
422 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
423 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
425 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
426 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
428 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
429 printing a summary to stderr.
430 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
432 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
433 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
434 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
436 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
437 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
439 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
440 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
441 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
442 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
444 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
445 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
446 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
447 which is relatively unusual.
448 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
450 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
451 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
452 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
453 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
454 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
455 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
456 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
460 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
461 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
462 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
463 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
464 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
468 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
469 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
471 ** Changes in behavior
473 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
474 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
475 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
476 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
477 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
480 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
484 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
485 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
487 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
488 before data copying has started.
490 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
491 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
493 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
494 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
495 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
496 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
498 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
499 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
500 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
501 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
503 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
508 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
509 for its standard streams.
511 ** Changes in behavior
513 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
514 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
515 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
516 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
517 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
518 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
520 ** Deprecated options
522 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
523 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
527 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
529 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
530 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
533 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
535 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
536 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
538 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
539 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
542 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
546 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
547 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
548 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
549 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
551 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
552 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
553 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
554 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
555 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
560 make check: two tests have been corrected
564 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
565 inherited from gnulib.
568 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
572 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
573 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
574 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
575 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
577 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
578 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
580 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
582 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
583 systems without xattr support.
585 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
586 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
587 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
589 ** Changes in behavior
591 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
592 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
593 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
594 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
596 ** Improved robustness
598 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
599 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
600 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
601 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
602 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
603 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
604 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
605 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
606 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
610 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
611 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
613 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
614 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
615 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
616 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
617 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
620 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
624 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
625 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
626 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
630 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
631 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
632 data was read, or on process exit.
633 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
635 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
636 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
637 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
638 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
640 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
641 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
642 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
643 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
645 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
646 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
648 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
649 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
651 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
652 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
653 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
655 ** Changes in behavior
657 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
658 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
659 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
661 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
662 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
664 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
665 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
666 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
669 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
673 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
675 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
676 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
677 install: Never copies xattrs
679 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
680 from overwriting any existing destination file
682 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
683 mode where this feature is available.
685 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
686 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
687 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
688 do not modify the destination at all.
690 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
692 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
696 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
697 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
699 cp uses much less memory in some situations
701 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
702 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
704 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
705 processing the first file name
707 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
708 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
709 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
710 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
712 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
713 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
715 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
716 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
719 ** Changes in behavior
721 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
722 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
724 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
725 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
726 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
728 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
729 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
731 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
733 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
734 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
735 is still marked with a '+'.
738 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
742 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
743 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
747 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
748 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
749 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
750 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
751 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
752 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
754 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
755 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
757 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
758 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
760 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
762 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
763 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
764 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
766 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
767 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
769 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
770 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
771 used to factor large numbers.
773 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
776 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
778 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
780 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
781 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
783 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
784 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
785 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
786 maximum command-line (argv) length.
788 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
789 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
790 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
792 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
793 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
797 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
799 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
800 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
802 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
803 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
805 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
807 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
808 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
812 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
813 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
814 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
816 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
818 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
819 no matter how many files are in a given directory
821 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
822 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
823 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
825 ** Changes in behavior
827 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
828 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
831 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
835 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
837 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
838 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
839 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
841 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
842 with no USERNAME argument.
844 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
845 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
846 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
848 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
849 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
850 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
851 number of fields for some inputs.
853 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
854 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
856 ** Changes in behavior
858 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
859 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
862 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
866 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
868 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
869 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
870 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
871 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
873 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
874 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
876 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
877 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
879 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
880 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
882 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
883 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
884 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
885 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
887 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
888 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
889 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
890 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
891 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
892 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
894 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
895 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
897 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
898 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
899 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
901 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
902 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
904 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
905 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
907 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
908 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
909 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
910 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
912 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
913 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
915 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
916 in more cases when a directory is empty.
918 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
919 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
920 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
924 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
925 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
927 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
928 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
929 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
930 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
934 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
935 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
937 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
939 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
943 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
944 which have negative errno values.
948 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
952 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
956 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
957 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
960 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
964 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
965 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
966 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
968 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
969 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
970 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
971 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
975 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
976 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
977 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
978 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
981 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
985 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
987 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
988 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
989 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
992 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
996 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
997 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
999 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1001 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1003 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1005 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1009 ** Changes in behavior
1011 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1012 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1014 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1015 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1017 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1018 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1019 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1023 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1024 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1025 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1026 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1027 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1028 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1029 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1030 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1031 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1032 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1033 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1035 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1036 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1037 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1040 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1043 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1044 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1045 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1047 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1048 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1049 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1052 ** New build options
1054 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1055 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1056 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1057 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1059 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1060 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1061 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1062 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1063 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1064 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1065 of "make check" fail.
1067 ** Remove deprecated options
1069 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1070 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1071 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1072 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1073 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1075 ** Improved robustness
1077 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1078 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1079 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1080 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1081 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1082 loss of the contents of a/f.
1084 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1085 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1089 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1090 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1091 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1093 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1094 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1095 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1096 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1098 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1099 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1100 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1101 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1102 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1103 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1104 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1105 destination is a symlink.
1107 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1109 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1110 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1112 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1113 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1115 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1117 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1118 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1120 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1121 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1123 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1126 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1127 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1129 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1130 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1132 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1133 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1134 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1135 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1137 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1138 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1139 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1141 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1142 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1143 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1145 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1146 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1147 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1148 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1150 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1151 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1152 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1154 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1155 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1157 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1158 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1160 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1162 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1163 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1164 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1166 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1167 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1169 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1170 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1172 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1173 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1175 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1176 [present in the original version]
1179 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1183 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1185 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1186 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1187 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1189 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1190 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1192 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1196 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1197 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1199 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1200 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1202 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1203 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1205 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1206 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1207 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1208 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1209 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1210 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1212 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1213 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1216 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1217 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1219 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1222 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1223 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1224 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1226 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1227 directory is unreadable.
1229 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1230 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1231 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1233 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1234 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1235 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1236 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1237 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1240 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1241 Before it would print nothing.
1243 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1245 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1246 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1247 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1248 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1249 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1250 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1251 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1252 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1254 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1258 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1259 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1260 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1262 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1263 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1264 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1265 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1268 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1272 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1273 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1274 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1275 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1276 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1277 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1278 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1280 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1281 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1282 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1283 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1284 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1285 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1286 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1287 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1289 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1290 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1291 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1294 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1298 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1299 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1301 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1302 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1303 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1305 ** Improved robustness
1307 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1308 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1309 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1312 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1316 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1317 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1318 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1319 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1320 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1322 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1326 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1329 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1333 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1334 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1335 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1336 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1338 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1339 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1341 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1342 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1343 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1346 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1348 ** Improved robustness
1350 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1351 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1353 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1354 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1355 or NFS-mounted partition.
1357 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1358 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1362 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1363 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1364 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1365 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1366 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1367 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1369 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1370 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1372 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1373 or neglect to report file removal.
1375 For the "groups" command:
1377 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1378 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1380 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1382 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1384 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1388 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1389 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1392 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1394 ** Changes in behavior
1396 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1397 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1398 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1399 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1401 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1402 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1403 a final `./' or `../' component.
1405 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1406 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1407 this only for pipes.
1409 ** Infrastructure changes
1411 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1412 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1413 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1414 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1418 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1419 name is "." or "..".
1421 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1422 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1423 dirent.d_type support.
1425 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1426 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1428 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1429 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1430 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1431 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1434 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1436 ** Changes in behavior
1438 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1442 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1443 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1447 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1448 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1449 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1451 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1452 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1454 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1455 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1457 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1459 ** Improved robustness
1461 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1462 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1463 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1465 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1466 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1469 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1470 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1472 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1473 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1475 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1476 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1478 ** Changes in behavior
1480 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1481 where the two are distinct.
1483 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1484 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1485 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1486 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1487 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1488 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1489 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1490 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1491 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1492 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1493 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1494 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1495 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1496 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1497 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1498 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1499 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1501 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1502 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1503 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1505 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1506 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1507 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1508 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1511 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1512 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1516 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1517 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1518 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1519 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1521 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1522 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1523 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1525 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1526 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1527 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1528 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1529 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1532 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1533 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1535 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1536 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1537 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1538 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1540 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1541 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1542 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1544 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1545 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1546 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1547 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1549 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1550 and sticky) with the -m option.
1552 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1553 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1554 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1555 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1556 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1558 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1559 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1561 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1565 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1566 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1567 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1568 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1570 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1572 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1574 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1575 silently ignoring one of them.
1577 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1578 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1579 containing this change was 5.92.
1581 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1582 automatically newline terminated.
1584 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1585 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1586 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1587 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1590 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1591 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1592 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1595 ** Scheduled for removal
1597 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1598 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1600 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1601 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1602 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1603 command to unlink a directory.
1605 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1606 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1607 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1608 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1612 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1613 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1614 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1615 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1616 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1617 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1621 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1622 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1624 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1626 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1627 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1628 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1630 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1631 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1634 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1635 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1637 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1638 list directories before files.
1640 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1641 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1642 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1643 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1646 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1648 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1650 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1651 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1652 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1654 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1655 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1659 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1660 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1661 usually printing nothing.
1663 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1665 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1666 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1667 them with hard-linked directories.
1669 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1670 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1671 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1673 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1674 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1675 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1677 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1680 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1681 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1683 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1684 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1686 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1687 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1689 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1690 all command-line arguments.
1692 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1694 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1696 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1697 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1699 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1701 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1702 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1703 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1704 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1705 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1707 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1708 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1710 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1711 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1712 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1713 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1715 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1717 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1721 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1722 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1724 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1725 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1727 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1728 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1730 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1731 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1733 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1734 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1736 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1738 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1739 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1740 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1743 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1745 ** Build-related bug fixes
1747 installing .mo files would fail
1750 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1754 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1756 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1759 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1763 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1764 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1768 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1770 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1771 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1773 ** Deprecated options
1775 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1776 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1778 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1782 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1784 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1785 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1786 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1787 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1789 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1792 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1798 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1803 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1805 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1807 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1808 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1809 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1811 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1812 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1813 problematic usages. These include:
1815 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1816 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1817 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1818 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1819 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1820 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1821 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1822 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1823 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1825 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1826 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1828 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1829 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1830 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1831 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1833 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1834 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1835 between binary and text files.
1837 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1841 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1845 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1846 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1848 head tac tail tee tr
1849 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1851 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1852 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1854 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1855 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1856 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1858 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1860 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1862 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1863 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1864 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1868 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1870 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1871 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1873 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1874 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1875 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1879 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1880 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1884 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1885 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1886 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1890 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1891 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1895 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1897 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1899 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1903 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1904 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1905 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1907 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1908 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1909 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1910 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1911 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1913 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
1917 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
1918 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
1919 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
1921 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
1923 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
1924 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
1925 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
1926 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
1928 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
1930 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
1931 rather than silently wrapping around.
1933 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
1934 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
1936 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
1937 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
1939 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
1940 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
1941 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
1942 file /tmp/a/b/file".
1944 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
1946 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
1948 ** Improved robustness
1950 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
1951 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
1952 no matter how large the result.
1954 ** Improved portability
1956 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
1957 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
1959 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
1961 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
1962 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
1963 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
1965 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
1966 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
1970 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
1971 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
1973 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
1975 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
1976 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
1977 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
1978 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
1980 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
1981 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
1983 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
1984 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
1985 categories if not specified by dircolors.
1987 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
1989 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
1990 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
1992 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
1993 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
1995 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
1997 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
1998 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2000 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2001 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2003 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2004 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2005 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2007 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2009 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2011 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2015 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2017 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2018 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2019 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2021 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2022 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2024 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2025 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2026 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2028 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2029 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2031 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2032 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2033 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2034 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2036 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2037 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2039 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2040 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2041 the file system does not support it.
2043 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2045 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2046 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2048 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2050 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2051 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2053 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2054 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2055 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2056 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2058 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2059 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2062 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2063 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2064 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2065 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2067 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2068 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2069 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2070 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2072 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2073 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2075 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2077 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2078 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2079 reporting incorrect results.
2083 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2084 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2086 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2089 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2091 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2092 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2094 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2095 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2097 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2100 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2101 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2102 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2103 the file name does not look like a page range.
2105 printf has several changes:
2107 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2108 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2110 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2111 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2112 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2114 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2115 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2118 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2119 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2121 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2122 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2124 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2126 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2127 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2129 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2131 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2133 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2134 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2135 when first encountering the directory.
2139 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2140 output; POSIX requires this.
2142 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2143 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2145 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2147 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2148 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2150 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2151 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2153 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2154 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2155 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2156 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2157 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2158 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2159 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2161 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2162 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2163 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2165 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2166 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2168 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2170 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2172 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2173 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2174 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2175 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2177 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2181 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2182 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2183 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2184 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2185 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2187 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2188 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2189 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2191 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2192 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2194 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2195 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2197 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2198 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2199 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2200 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2201 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2203 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2204 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2206 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2207 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2209 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2211 nocreat do not create the output file
2212 excl fail if the output file already exists
2213 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2214 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2216 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2218 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2219 direct use direct I/O for data
2220 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2221 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2222 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2223 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2224 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2226 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2228 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2229 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2232 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2233 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2234 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2235 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2236 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2237 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2239 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2240 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2242 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2245 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2247 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2249 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2250 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2252 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2253 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2254 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2256 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2257 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2258 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2260 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2262 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2263 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2265 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2266 for compatibility with bash.
2268 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2270 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2271 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2272 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2273 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2275 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2276 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2278 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2279 ls supports TABSIZE.
2280 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2281 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2282 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2284 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2287 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2289 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2290 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2291 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2292 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2293 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2294 an offset, not as a file name.
2296 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2297 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2299 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2300 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2302 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2303 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2305 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2306 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2307 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2309 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2310 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2312 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2313 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2317 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2319 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2321 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2325 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2326 or more arguments between partitions.
2328 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2329 holes in the destination.
2331 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2332 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2333 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2334 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2335 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2336 terminates immediately.
2338 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2340 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2342 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2343 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2344 not the empty string.
2346 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2347 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2351 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2352 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2353 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2356 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2363 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2367 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2368 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2370 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2371 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2373 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2374 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2375 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2378 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2382 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2383 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2385 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2386 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2388 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2389 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2390 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2392 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2394 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2397 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2399 ** Configuration option
2401 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2402 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2406 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2407 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2411 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2412 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2413 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2416 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2417 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2418 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2419 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2420 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2421 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2422 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2425 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2429 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2430 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2431 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2433 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2434 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2436 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2438 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2439 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2440 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2441 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2443 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2445 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2446 not just the ones that reference directories
2448 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2449 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2451 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2452 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2453 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2455 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2456 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2457 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2458 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2459 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2460 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2462 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2467 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2468 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2470 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2472 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2474 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2476 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2477 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2479 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2480 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2482 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2484 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2488 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2490 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2492 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2493 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2494 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2495 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2496 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2498 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2499 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2501 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2502 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2504 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2505 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2507 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2508 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2509 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2513 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2514 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2515 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2516 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2517 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2518 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2519 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2520 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2521 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2522 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2523 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2524 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2525 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2526 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2528 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2530 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2531 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2533 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2535 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2537 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2538 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2540 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2542 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2543 without a trailing newline.
2545 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2546 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2548 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2551 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2555 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2557 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2559 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2560 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2561 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2562 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2564 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2566 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2567 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2568 be printed without leading spaces.
2570 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2571 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2576 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2577 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2578 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2580 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2582 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2583 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2585 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2586 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2588 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2589 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2591 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2593 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2595 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2597 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2598 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2600 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2602 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2604 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2605 byte offsets are specified.
2608 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2611 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2614 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2615 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2616 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2617 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2618 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2619 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2620 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2621 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2622 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2623 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2624 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2625 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2626 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2627 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2628 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2629 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2630 directory where M has write access.
2631 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2632 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2633 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2636 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2637 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2638 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2639 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2640 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2641 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2642 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2643 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2644 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2645 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2646 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2647 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2648 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2649 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2650 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2651 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2652 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2653 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2654 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2655 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2656 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2657 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2658 appeared one additional time.
2660 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2661 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2662 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2663 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2666 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2667 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2668 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2669 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2670 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2671 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2672 if there were more than 338.
2674 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2675 - false --help now exits nonzero
2678 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2679 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2680 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2681 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2684 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2685 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2686 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2687 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2688 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2691 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2692 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2693 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2694 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2695 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2696 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2697 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2700 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2701 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2702 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2703 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2704 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2705 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2707 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2708 under certain unusual conditions
2709 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2710 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2713 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2714 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2715 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2716 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2717 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2718 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2719 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2720 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2721 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2722 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2723 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2724 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2725 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2726 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2727 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2728 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2731 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2732 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2735 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2736 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2737 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2738 involving hard-linked directories
2739 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2740 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2741 character-special and block files
2744 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2745 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2746 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2747 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2748 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2749 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2750 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2751 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2752 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2754 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2755 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2756 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2757 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2758 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2759 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2760 specified on the command line.
2761 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2762 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2763 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2764 the first file untouched.
2765 * readlink: new program
2766 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2767 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2768 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2769 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2770 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2771 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2774 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2775 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2776 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2777 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2778 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2779 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2780 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2781 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2782 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2783 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2784 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2785 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2787 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2788 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2789 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2791 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2792 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2793 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2794 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2795 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2796 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2797 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2798 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2801 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2802 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2805 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2806 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2807 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2808 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2809 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2810 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2811 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2814 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2815 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2817 ========================================================================
2818 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2819 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2822 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2824 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2825 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2826 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2827 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2828 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2829 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2830 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2831 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2832 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2833 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2834 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2835 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2837 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2838 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2839 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2840 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2842 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2845 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2847 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2848 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2849 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2850 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2851 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2852 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2853 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2856 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2857 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2858 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2859 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2860 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2861 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2862 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2863 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2864 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2865 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2866 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2867 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2868 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2869 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2870 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2871 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2873 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2874 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2876 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2877 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2878 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2879 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2880 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2881 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2883 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2884 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2885 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2886 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2887 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2888 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2889 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2891 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2892 the source files in the following example:
2893 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2894 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2895 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2896 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2897 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2898 links between source files with --preserve=links
2899 * cp accepts new options:
2900 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2901 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2902 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2903 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2904 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2905 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2906 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2907 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2908 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2910 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2911 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2912 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2913 even though it's older than dest.
2914 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
2915 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
2916 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
2917 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
2918 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
2920 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
2921 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
2922 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
2923 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
2924 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
2925 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
2926 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
2928 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
2929 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
2930 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
2932 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
2933 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
2934 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
2935 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
2936 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
2937 This is the default.
2939 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
2940 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
2941 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
2942 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
2943 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
2945 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
2948 ========================================================================
2949 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
2950 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2953 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
2954 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
2956 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2957 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
2958 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
2959 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
2960 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
2962 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
2963 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
2964 that specifies a non-directory
2967 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
2968 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
2969 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
2970 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
2971 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2972 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
2973 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
2974 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2975 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
2976 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
2977 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
2978 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
2979 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
2980 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
2981 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
2982 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
2983 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
2984 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
2985 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
2986 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
2987 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
2988 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
2989 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
2990 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
2992 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
2993 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
2994 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
2996 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
2998 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
2999 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3001 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3002 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3003 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3004 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3005 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3007 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3008 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3009 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3010 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3011 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3013 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3015 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3016 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3017 * still more portability fixes
3018 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3019 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3021 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3023 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3025 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3027 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3028 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3029 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3030 there is any time remaining
3031 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3033 ========================================================================
3034 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3035 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3037 This package began as the union of the following:
3038 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3040 ========================================================================
3042 Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3044 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3045 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3046 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3047 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3048 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3049 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.