1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9+ (????-??-??) [stable]
7 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
8 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
10 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
12 ** Programs no longer installed by default
16 ** Changes in behavior
18 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
19 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
21 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
22 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
23 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
27 Add SELinux support (FIXME: add details here)
29 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
30 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
31 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
33 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
34 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
35 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
40 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
41 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
42 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
43 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
45 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
46 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
47 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
48 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
49 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
50 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
53 ** Remove deprecated options
55 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
56 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
57 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
58 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
59 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
61 ** Improved robustness
63 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
64 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
65 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
66 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
67 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
68 loss of the contents of a/f.
70 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
71 in its 35-colon commmand-line argument
75 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
76 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
77 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
79 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
80 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
81 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
82 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
84 cp no longer fails to write through a dangling symlink
85 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]. cp --parents no
86 longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file name
87 components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b
88 d" no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a
89 destination symlink to be the same as the referenced file when
90 copying links or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink
91 to FILE, "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently
92 doing nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when
93 the destination is a symlink.
95 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
97 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
98 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
100 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
101 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
103 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
105 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
106 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
108 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
111 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
112 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
114 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
115 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
117 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
118 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
119 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
120 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
122 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
123 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
124 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
126 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
127 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
128 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
130 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
131 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
132 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
133 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
135 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
136 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
138 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
139 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
140 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
142 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
143 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
145 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
146 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
148 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
149 complement of Set1. [introduced with the original version, in 1992]
151 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
154 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
158 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
160 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
161 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
162 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
164 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
165 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
167 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
171 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
172 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
174 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
175 support but with insufficient /proc support.
177 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
178 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
180 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
181 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
182 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
183 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
184 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
185 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
187 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
188 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
191 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
192 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
194 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
197 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
198 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
199 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
201 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
202 directory is unreadable.
204 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
205 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
206 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
208 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
209 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
210 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
211 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
212 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
215 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
216 Before it would print nothing.
218 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
220 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
221 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
222 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
223 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
224 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
225 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
226 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
227 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
229 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
233 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
234 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
235 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
237 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
238 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
239 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
240 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
243 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
247 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
248 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
249 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
250 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
251 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
252 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
253 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
255 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
256 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
257 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
258 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
259 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
260 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
261 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
262 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
264 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
265 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
266 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
269 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
273 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
274 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
276 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
277 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
278 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
280 ** Improved robustness
282 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
283 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
284 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
287 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
291 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
292 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
293 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
294 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
295 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
297 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
301 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
304 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
308 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
309 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
310 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
311 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
313 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
314 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
316 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
317 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
318 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
321 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
323 ** Improved robustness
325 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
326 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
328 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
329 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
330 or NFS-mounted partition.
332 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
333 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
337 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
338 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
339 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
340 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
341 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
342 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
344 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
345 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
347 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
348 or neglect to report file removal.
350 For the "groups" command:
352 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
353 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
355 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
357 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
359 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
363 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
364 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
367 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
369 ** Changes in behavior
371 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
372 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
373 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
374 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
376 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
377 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
378 a final `./' or `../' component.
380 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
381 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
384 ** Infrastructure changes
386 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
387 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
388 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
389 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
393 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
396 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
397 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
398 dirent.d_type support.
400 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
401 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
403 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
404 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
405 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
406 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
409 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
411 ** Changes in behavior
413 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
417 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
418 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
422 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
423 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
424 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
426 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
427 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
429 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
430 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
432 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
434 ** Improved robustness
436 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
437 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
438 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
440 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
441 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
444 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
445 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
447 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
448 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
450 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
451 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
453 ** Changes in behavior
455 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
456 where the two are distinct.
458 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
459 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
460 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
461 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
462 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
463 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
464 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
465 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
466 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
467 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
468 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
469 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
470 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
471 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
472 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
473 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
474 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
476 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
477 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
478 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
480 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
481 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
482 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
483 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
486 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
487 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
491 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
492 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
493 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
494 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
496 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
497 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
498 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
500 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
501 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
502 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
503 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
504 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
507 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
508 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
510 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
511 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
512 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
513 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
515 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
516 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
517 successful and the output is easier to parse.
519 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
520 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
521 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
522 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
524 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
525 and sticky) with the -m option.
527 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
528 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
529 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
530 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
531 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
533 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
534 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
536 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
540 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
541 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
542 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
543 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
545 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
547 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
549 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
550 silently ignoring one of them.
552 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
553 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
554 containing this change was 5.92.
556 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
557 automatically newline terminated.
559 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
560 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
561 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
562 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
565 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
566 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
567 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
570 ** Scheduled for removal
572 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
573 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
575 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
576 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
577 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
578 command to unlink a directory.
580 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
581 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
582 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
583 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
587 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
588 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
589 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
590 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
591 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
592 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
596 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
597 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
599 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
601 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
602 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
603 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
605 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
606 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
609 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
610 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
612 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
613 list directories before files.
615 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
616 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
617 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
618 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
621 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
623 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
625 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
626 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
627 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
629 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
630 list of NUL-terminated file names.
634 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
635 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
636 usually printing nothing.
638 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
640 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
641 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
642 them with hard-linked directories.
644 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
645 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
646 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
648 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
649 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
650 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
652 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
655 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
656 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
658 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
659 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
661 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
662 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
664 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
665 all command-line arguments.
667 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
669 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
671 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
672 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
674 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
676 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
677 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
678 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
679 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
680 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
682 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
683 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
685 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
686 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
687 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
688 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
690 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
692 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
696 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
697 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
699 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
700 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
702 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
703 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
705 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
706 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
708 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
709 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
711 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
713 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
714 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
715 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
718 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
720 ** Build-related bug fixes
722 installing .mo files would fail
725 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
729 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
731 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
734 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
738 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
739 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
743 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
745 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
746 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
748 ** Deprecated options
750 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
751 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
753 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
757 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
759 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
760 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
761 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
762 conforming to older POSIX versions.
764 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
767 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
773 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
778 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
780 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
782 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
783 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
784 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
786 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
787 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
788 problematic usages. These include:
790 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
791 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
792 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
793 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
794 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
795 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
796 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
797 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
798 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
800 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
801 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
803 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
804 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
805 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
806 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
808 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
809 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
810 between binary and text files.
812 The following programs now always use text input/output:
816 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
820 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
821 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
824 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
826 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
827 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
829 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
830 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
831 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
833 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
835 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
837 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
838 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
839 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
843 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
845 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
846 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
848 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
849 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
850 blocks until F contains N blocks.
854 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
855 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
859 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
860 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
861 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
865 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
866 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
870 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
872 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
874 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
878 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
879 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
880 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
882 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
883 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
884 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
885 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
886 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
888 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
892 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
893 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
894 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
896 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
898 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
899 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
900 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
901 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
903 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
905 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
906 rather than silently wrapping around.
908 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
909 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
911 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
912 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
914 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
915 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
916 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
919 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
921 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
923 ** Improved robustness
925 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
926 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
927 no matter how large the result.
929 ** Improved portability
931 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
932 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
934 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
936 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
937 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
938 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
940 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
941 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
945 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
946 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
948 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
950 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
951 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
952 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
953 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
955 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
956 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
958 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
959 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
960 categories if not specified by dircolors.
962 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
964 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
965 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
967 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
968 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
970 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
972 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
973 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
975 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
976 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
978 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
979 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
980 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
982 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
984 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
986 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
990 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
992 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
993 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
994 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
996 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
997 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
999 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
1000 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
1001 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
1003 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
1004 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
1006 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
1007 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
1008 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
1009 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
1011 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
1012 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
1014 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
1015 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
1016 the file system does not support it.
1018 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
1020 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
1021 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
1023 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
1025 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
1026 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
1028 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
1029 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
1030 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
1031 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
1033 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
1034 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
1037 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
1038 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
1039 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
1040 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
1042 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
1043 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
1044 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
1045 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
1047 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
1048 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
1050 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
1052 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
1053 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
1054 reporting incorrect results.
1058 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
1059 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
1061 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
1064 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
1066 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
1067 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
1069 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
1070 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
1072 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
1075 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
1076 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
1077 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
1078 the file name does not look like a page range.
1080 printf has several changes:
1082 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
1083 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
1085 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
1086 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
1087 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
1089 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
1090 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
1093 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
1094 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
1096 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
1097 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
1099 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
1101 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
1102 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
1104 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
1106 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
1108 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
1109 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
1110 when first encountering the directory.
1114 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
1115 output; POSIX requires this.
1117 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
1118 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
1120 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
1122 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
1123 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
1125 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
1126 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
1128 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
1129 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
1130 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
1131 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
1132 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
1133 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
1134 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
1136 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
1137 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
1138 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
1140 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
1141 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
1143 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
1145 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
1147 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
1148 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
1149 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
1150 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
1152 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
1156 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
1157 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
1158 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
1159 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
1160 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
1162 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
1163 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
1164 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
1166 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
1167 is longer than PATH_MAX.
1169 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
1170 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
1172 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
1173 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
1174 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
1175 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
1176 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
1178 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
1179 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
1181 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
1182 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
1184 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
1186 nocreat do not create the output file
1187 excl fail if the output file already exists
1188 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
1189 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
1191 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
1193 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
1194 direct use direct I/O for data
1195 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
1196 sync likewise, but also for metadata
1197 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
1198 nofollow do not follow symlinks
1199 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
1201 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
1203 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
1204 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
1207 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
1208 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
1209 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
1210 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
1211 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
1212 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
1214 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1215 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1217 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
1220 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
1222 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
1224 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
1225 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
1227 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
1228 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
1229 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
1231 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
1232 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
1233 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
1235 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
1237 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
1238 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
1240 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
1241 for compatibility with bash.
1243 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
1245 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
1246 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
1247 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
1248 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
1250 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
1251 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
1253 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
1254 ls supports TABSIZE.
1255 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
1256 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
1257 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
1259 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
1262 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
1264 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
1265 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
1266 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
1267 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
1268 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
1269 an offset, not as a file name.
1271 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
1272 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
1274 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
1275 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
1277 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
1278 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
1280 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
1281 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
1282 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
1284 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
1285 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
1287 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
1288 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
1292 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
1294 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
1296 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
1300 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
1301 or more arguments between partitions.
1303 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
1304 holes in the destination.
1306 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
1307 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
1308 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
1309 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
1310 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
1311 terminates immediately.
1313 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
1315 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
1317 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
1318 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
1319 not the empty string.
1321 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
1322 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
1326 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
1327 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
1328 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
1331 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
1338 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
1342 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
1343 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
1345 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
1346 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
1348 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
1349 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
1350 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
1353 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
1357 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
1358 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
1360 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
1361 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
1363 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
1364 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
1365 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
1367 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
1369 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
1372 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
1374 ** Configuration option
1376 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
1377 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
1381 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
1382 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
1386 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
1387 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
1388 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
1391 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
1392 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
1393 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
1394 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
1395 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
1396 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
1397 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
1400 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
1404 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
1405 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
1406 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
1408 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
1409 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
1411 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
1413 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
1414 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
1415 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
1416 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
1418 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
1420 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
1421 not just the ones that reference directories
1423 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
1424 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
1426 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
1427 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
1428 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
1430 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
1431 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
1432 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
1433 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
1434 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
1435 ragged when a datum was too wide.
1437 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
1442 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
1443 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
1445 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
1447 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
1449 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
1451 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
1452 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
1454 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
1455 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
1457 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
1459 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
1463 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
1465 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
1467 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
1468 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
1469 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
1470 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
1471 resolution is the best we can do right now.
1473 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
1474 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
1476 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
1477 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
1479 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
1480 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
1482 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
1483 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
1484 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
1488 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
1489 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
1490 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
1491 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
1492 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
1493 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
1494 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
1495 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
1496 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
1497 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
1498 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
1499 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
1500 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
1501 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
1503 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
1505 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
1506 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
1508 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
1510 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
1512 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
1513 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
1515 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
1517 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
1518 without a trailing newline.
1520 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
1521 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
1523 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
1526 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
1530 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
1532 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
1534 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
1535 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
1536 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
1537 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
1539 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
1541 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
1542 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
1543 be printed without leading spaces.
1545 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
1546 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
1551 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
1552 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
1553 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
1555 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
1557 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
1558 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
1560 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
1561 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
1563 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
1564 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
1566 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
1568 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
1570 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
1572 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
1573 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
1575 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
1577 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
1579 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
1580 byte offsets are specified.
1583 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
1586 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
1589 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
1590 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
1591 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
1592 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
1593 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
1594 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
1595 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
1596 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
1597 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
1598 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
1599 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
1600 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
1601 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
1602 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
1603 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
1604 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
1605 directory where M has write access.
1606 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
1607 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
1608 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
1611 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
1612 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
1613 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
1614 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
1615 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
1616 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
1617 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
1618 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
1619 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
1620 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
1621 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
1622 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
1623 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
1624 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
1625 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
1626 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
1627 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
1628 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
1629 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
1630 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
1631 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
1632 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
1633 appeared one additional time.
1635 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
1636 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
1637 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
1638 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
1641 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
1642 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
1643 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
1644 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
1645 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
1646 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
1647 if there were more than 338.
1649 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
1650 - false --help now exits nonzero
1653 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
1654 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
1655 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
1656 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
1659 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
1660 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
1661 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
1662 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
1663 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
1666 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
1667 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
1668 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
1669 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
1670 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
1671 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
1672 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
1675 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
1676 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
1677 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
1678 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
1679 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
1680 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
1682 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
1683 under certain unusual conditions
1684 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
1685 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
1688 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
1689 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
1690 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
1691 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
1692 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
1693 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
1694 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
1695 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
1696 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
1697 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
1698 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
1699 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
1700 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
1701 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
1702 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
1703 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
1706 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
1707 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
1710 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
1711 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
1712 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
1713 involving hard-linked directories
1714 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
1715 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
1716 character-special and block files
1719 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
1720 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
1721 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
1722 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
1723 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
1724 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
1725 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
1726 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
1727 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
1729 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
1730 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
1731 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
1732 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
1733 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
1734 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
1735 specified on the command line.
1736 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
1737 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
1738 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
1739 the first file untouched.
1740 * readlink: new program
1741 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
1742 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
1743 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
1744 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
1745 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
1746 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
1749 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
1750 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
1751 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
1752 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
1753 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
1754 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
1755 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
1756 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
1757 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
1758 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
1759 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
1760 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
1762 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
1763 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
1764 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
1766 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
1767 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
1768 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
1769 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
1770 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
1771 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
1772 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
1773 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
1776 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
1777 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
1780 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
1781 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
1782 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
1783 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
1784 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
1785 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
1786 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
1789 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
1790 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
1792 ========================================================================
1793 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
1794 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
1797 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
1799 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
1800 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
1801 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
1802 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
1803 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
1804 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
1805 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
1806 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
1807 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
1808 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
1809 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
1810 The old options will continue to work for a while.
1812 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
1813 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
1814 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
1815 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
1817 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
1820 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
1822 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
1823 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
1824 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
1825 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
1826 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
1827 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
1828 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
1831 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
1832 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
1833 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
1834 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
1835 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
1836 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
1837 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
1838 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
1839 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
1840 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
1841 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
1842 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
1843 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
1844 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
1845 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
1846 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
1848 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
1849 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
1851 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
1852 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
1853 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
1854 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
1855 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
1856 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
1858 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
1859 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
1860 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
1861 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
1862 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
1863 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
1864 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
1866 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
1867 the source files in the following example:
1868 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
1869 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
1870 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
1871 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
1872 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
1873 links between source files with --preserve=links
1874 * cp accepts new options:
1875 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
1876 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
1877 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
1878 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
1879 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
1880 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
1881 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
1882 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
1883 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
1885 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
1886 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
1887 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
1888 even though it's older than dest.
1889 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
1890 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
1891 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
1892 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
1893 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
1895 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
1896 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
1897 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
1898 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
1899 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
1900 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
1901 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
1903 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
1904 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
1905 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
1907 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
1908 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
1909 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
1910 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
1911 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
1912 This is the default.
1914 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
1915 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
1916 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
1917 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
1918 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
1920 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
1923 ========================================================================
1924 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
1925 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
1928 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
1929 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
1931 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
1932 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
1933 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
1934 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
1935 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
1937 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
1938 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
1939 that specifies a non-directory
1942 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
1943 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
1944 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
1945 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
1946 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
1947 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
1948 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
1949 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
1950 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
1951 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
1952 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
1953 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
1954 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
1955 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
1956 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
1957 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
1958 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
1959 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
1960 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
1961 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
1962 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
1963 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
1964 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
1965 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
1967 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
1968 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
1969 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
1971 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
1973 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
1974 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
1976 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
1977 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
1978 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
1979 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
1980 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
1982 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
1983 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
1984 required support; from Bruno Haible.
1985 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
1986 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
1988 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
1990 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
1991 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
1992 * still more portability fixes
1993 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
1994 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
1996 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
1998 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
2000 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
2002 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
2003 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
2004 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
2005 there is any time remaining
2006 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
2008 ========================================================================
2009 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2010 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
2012 This package began as the union of the following:
2013 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
2015 ========================================================================
2017 Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 Free Software
2020 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
2021 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
2022 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
2023 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
2024 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
2025 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.