1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
8 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
9 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
10 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
11 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
12 typically still point to one of the hard links.
14 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
15 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
16 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
17 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
18 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
21 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
25 realpath: print resolved file names.
29 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
30 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
32 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
33 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
35 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
36 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
37 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
38 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
39 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
40 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
42 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
43 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
44 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
46 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
47 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
48 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
50 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
51 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
52 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
53 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
54 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
56 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
58 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
59 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
61 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
62 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
63 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
65 ** Changes in behavior
67 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
68 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
69 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
70 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
71 usually-short referent instead.
73 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
74 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
75 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
76 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
79 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
83 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
84 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
85 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
87 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
88 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
90 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
91 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
95 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
96 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
98 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
99 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
100 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
101 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
103 ** Changes in behavior
105 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
106 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
107 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
111 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
112 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
113 only .tar.xz files is enough.
116 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
120 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
121 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
122 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
124 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
125 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
127 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
128 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
129 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
130 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
131 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
133 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
134 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
135 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
136 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
137 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
138 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
139 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
140 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
142 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
143 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
145 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
146 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
148 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
149 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
151 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
152 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
153 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
155 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
156 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
157 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
158 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
160 ** Changes in behavior
162 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
163 when -v or -c specified.
165 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
166 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
170 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
171 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
172 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
173 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
174 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
176 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
177 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
178 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
180 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
181 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
182 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
183 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
184 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
185 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
186 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
188 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
189 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
190 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
194 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
195 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
197 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
200 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
201 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
203 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
204 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
206 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
207 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
209 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
211 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
215 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
216 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
218 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
221 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
225 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
226 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
228 ** Changes in behavior
230 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
231 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
232 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
233 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
234 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
235 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
237 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
238 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
239 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
243 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
246 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
250 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
251 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
252 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
254 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
255 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
256 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
258 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
259 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
260 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
262 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
263 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
265 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
266 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
268 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
269 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
271 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
272 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
276 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
277 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
278 processed portion thereof.
280 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
281 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
283 ** Changes in behavior
285 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
286 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
287 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
289 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
290 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
291 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
293 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
294 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
296 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
297 Use --preserve-context instead.
299 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
302 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
306 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
307 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
308 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
309 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
310 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
312 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
313 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
315 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
316 reject file names invalid for that file system.
318 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
319 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
323 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
324 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
325 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
326 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
327 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
328 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
329 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
330 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
332 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
333 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
334 the same number of fields are output for each line.
336 ** Changes in behavior
338 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
339 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
340 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
343 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
347 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
348 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
349 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
352 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
356 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
357 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
359 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
360 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
362 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
363 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
365 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
366 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
367 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
368 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
370 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
371 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
373 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
374 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
375 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
377 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
379 ** Changes in behavior
381 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
382 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
383 to the number of available processors.
387 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
390 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
394 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
395 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
396 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
397 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
399 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
400 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
401 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
403 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
404 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
406 ** Changes in behavior
408 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
409 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
411 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
412 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
413 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
414 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
415 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
416 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
418 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
419 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
420 the same way as the others.
423 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
427 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
428 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
429 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
431 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
432 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
434 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
435 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
436 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
438 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
439 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
441 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
442 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
444 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
445 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
446 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
448 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
449 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
450 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
451 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
455 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
456 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
458 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
461 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
462 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
464 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
466 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
467 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
468 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
470 ** Changes in behavior
472 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
473 rather than its aliased target.
475 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
476 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
477 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
479 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
480 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
481 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
482 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
483 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
484 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
485 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
486 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
488 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
490 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
492 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
493 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
496 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
497 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
498 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
499 control like taskset for example.
501 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
503 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
504 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
505 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
506 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
507 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
508 includes %C when context information is available.
510 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
511 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
512 rather than a file system attribute.
514 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
515 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
516 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
517 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
519 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
520 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
521 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
523 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
524 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
525 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
528 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
532 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
533 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
535 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
537 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
538 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
540 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
541 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
542 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
543 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
545 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
546 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
547 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
551 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
552 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
554 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
555 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
556 duration after the initial signal was sent.
558 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
559 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
560 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
561 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
562 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
563 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
564 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
565 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
566 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
568 ** Changes in behavior
570 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
571 sequence when it would be a no-op.
573 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
574 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
577 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
581 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
582 of available processors, which may not have been the case
583 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
584 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
588 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
589 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
591 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
592 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
593 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
594 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
596 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
597 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
598 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
601 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
605 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
606 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
607 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
609 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
610 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
611 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
613 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
614 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
616 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
617 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
618 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
619 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
621 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
622 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
623 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
625 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
626 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
627 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
628 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
630 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
631 renamed-aside and then recreated.
632 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
634 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
635 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
636 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
637 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
639 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
640 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
641 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
643 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
644 processes will not intersperse their output.
645 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
648 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
652 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
653 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
655 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
656 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
658 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
659 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
660 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
661 the presence of the empty string argument.
662 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
664 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
665 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
666 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
667 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
669 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
670 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
672 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
673 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
674 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
676 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
677 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
678 and with a malicious user on the same system
679 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
680 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
683 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
687 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
688 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
689 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
691 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
692 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
693 offending directory and all "contents."
695 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
696 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
697 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
699 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
700 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
701 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
703 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
704 processes will not intersperse their output.
705 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
706 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
708 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
709 output the name of the file to stdout.
710 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
712 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
713 call fails with errno == EACCES.
714 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
716 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
717 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
720 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
721 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
722 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
724 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
725 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
726 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
727 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
728 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
729 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
731 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
732 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
733 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
734 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
736 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
737 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
739 ** Changes in behavior
741 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
742 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
743 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
744 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
745 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
747 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
748 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
749 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
750 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
752 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
754 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
755 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
756 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
757 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
758 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
762 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
766 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
767 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
769 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
770 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
772 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
773 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
774 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
776 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
777 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
780 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
784 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
785 when the source file doesn't have write access.
786 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
788 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
789 to accommodate leap seconds.
790 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
792 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
793 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
794 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
796 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
798 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
799 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
800 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
802 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
803 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
804 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
805 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
806 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
810 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
811 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
812 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
813 directory or a symlink to a directory.
815 ** Changes in behavior
817 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
818 environment variable is set.
820 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
821 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
822 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
826 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
827 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
828 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
829 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
831 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
832 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
833 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
834 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
838 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
839 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
840 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
842 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
843 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
844 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
845 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
846 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
847 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
850 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
851 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
854 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
858 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
859 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
860 and libraries tested at configure time.
861 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
863 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
864 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
866 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
867 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
869 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
870 printing a summary to stderr.
871 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
873 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
874 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
875 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
877 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
878 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
880 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
881 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
882 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
883 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
885 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
886 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
887 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
888 which is relatively unusual.
889 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
891 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
892 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
893 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
894 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
895 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
896 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
897 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
901 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
902 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
903 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
904 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
905 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
909 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
910 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
912 ** Changes in behavior
914 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
915 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
916 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
917 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
918 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
921 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
925 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
926 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
928 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
929 before data copying has started.
931 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
932 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
934 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
935 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
936 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
937 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
939 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
940 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
941 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
942 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
944 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
949 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
950 for its standard streams.
952 ** Changes in behavior
954 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
955 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
956 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
957 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
958 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
959 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
961 ** Deprecated options
963 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
964 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
968 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
970 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
971 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
974 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
976 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
977 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
979 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
980 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
983 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
987 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
988 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
989 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
990 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
992 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
993 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
994 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
995 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
996 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1001 make check: two tests have been corrected
1005 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1006 inherited from gnulib.
1009 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1013 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1014 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1015 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1016 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1018 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1019 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1021 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1023 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1024 systems without xattr support.
1026 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1027 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1028 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1030 ** Changes in behavior
1032 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1033 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1034 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1035 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1037 ** Improved robustness
1039 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1040 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1041 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1042 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1043 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1044 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1045 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1046 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1047 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1051 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1052 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1054 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1055 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1056 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1057 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1058 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1061 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1065 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1066 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1067 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1071 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1072 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1073 data was read, or on process exit.
1074 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1076 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1077 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1078 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1079 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1081 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1082 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1083 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1084 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1086 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1087 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1089 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1090 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1092 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1093 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1094 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1096 ** Changes in behavior
1098 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1099 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1100 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1102 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1103 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1105 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1106 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1107 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1110 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1114 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1116 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1117 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1118 install: Never copies xattrs
1120 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1121 from overwriting any existing destination file
1123 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1124 mode where this feature is available.
1126 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1127 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1128 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1129 do not modify the destination at all.
1131 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1133 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1137 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1138 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1140 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1142 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1143 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1145 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1146 processing the first file name
1148 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1149 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1150 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1151 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1153 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1154 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1156 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1157 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1160 ** Changes in behavior
1162 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1163 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1165 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1166 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1167 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1169 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1170 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1172 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1174 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1175 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1176 is still marked with a '+'.
1179 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1183 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1184 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1188 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1189 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1190 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1191 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1192 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1193 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1195 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1196 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1198 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1199 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1201 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1203 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1204 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1205 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1207 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1208 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1210 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1211 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1212 used to factor large numbers.
1214 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1217 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1219 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1221 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1222 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1224 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1225 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1226 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1227 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1229 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1230 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1231 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1233 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1234 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1238 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1240 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1241 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1243 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1244 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1246 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1248 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1249 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1253 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1254 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1255 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1257 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1259 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1260 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1261 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1263 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1264 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1265 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1267 ** Changes in behavior
1269 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1270 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1273 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1277 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1278 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1279 'futimens' system calls.
1283 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1285 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1286 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1287 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1289 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1290 with no USERNAME argument.
1292 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1293 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1294 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1296 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1297 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1298 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1299 number of fields for some inputs.
1301 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1302 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1304 ** Changes in behavior
1306 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1307 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1310 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1314 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1316 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1317 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1318 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1319 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1321 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1322 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1324 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1325 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1327 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1328 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1330 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1331 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1332 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1333 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1335 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1336 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1337 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1338 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1339 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1340 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1342 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1343 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1345 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1346 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1347 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1349 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1350 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1352 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1353 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1355 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1356 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1357 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1358 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1360 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1361 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1363 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1364 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1366 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1367 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1368 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1372 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1373 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1375 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1376 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1377 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1378 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1382 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1383 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1385 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1387 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1391 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1392 which have negative errno values.
1396 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1400 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1404 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1405 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1408 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1412 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1413 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1414 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1416 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1417 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1418 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1419 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1423 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1424 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1425 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1426 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1429 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1433 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1435 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1436 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1437 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1440 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1444 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1445 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1447 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1449 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1451 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1453 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1457 ** Changes in behavior
1459 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1460 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1462 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1463 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1465 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1466 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1467 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1471 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1472 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1473 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1474 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1475 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1476 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1477 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1478 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1479 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1480 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1481 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1483 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1484 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1485 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1488 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1491 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1492 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1493 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1495 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1496 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1497 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1500 ** New build options
1502 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1503 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1504 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1505 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1507 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1508 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1509 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1510 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1511 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1512 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1513 of "make check" fail.
1515 ** Remove deprecated options
1517 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1518 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1519 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1520 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1521 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1523 ** Improved robustness
1525 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1526 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1527 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1528 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1529 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1530 loss of the contents of a/f.
1532 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1533 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1537 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1538 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1539 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1541 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1542 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1543 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1544 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1546 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1547 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1548 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1549 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1550 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1551 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1552 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1553 destination is a symlink.
1555 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1557 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1558 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1560 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1561 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1563 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1565 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1566 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1568 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1569 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1571 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1574 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1575 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1577 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1578 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1580 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1581 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1582 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1583 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1585 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1586 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1587 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1589 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1590 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1591 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1593 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1594 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1595 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1596 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1598 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1599 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1600 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1602 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1603 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1605 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1606 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1608 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1610 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1611 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1612 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1614 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1615 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1617 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1618 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1620 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1621 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1623 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1624 [present in the original version]
1627 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1631 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1633 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1634 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1635 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1637 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1638 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1640 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1644 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1645 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1647 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1648 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1650 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1651 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1653 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1654 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1655 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1656 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1657 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1658 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1660 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1661 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1664 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1665 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1667 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1670 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1671 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1672 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1674 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1675 directory is unreadable.
1677 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1678 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1679 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1681 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1682 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1683 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1684 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1685 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1688 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1689 Before it would print nothing.
1691 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1693 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1694 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1695 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1696 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1697 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1698 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1699 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1700 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1702 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1706 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1707 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1708 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1710 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1711 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1712 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1713 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1716 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1720 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1721 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1722 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1723 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1724 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1725 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1726 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1728 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1729 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1730 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1731 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1732 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1733 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1734 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1735 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1737 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1738 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1739 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1742 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1746 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1747 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1749 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1750 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1751 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1753 ** Improved robustness
1755 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1756 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1757 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1760 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1764 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1765 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1766 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1767 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1768 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1770 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1774 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1777 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1781 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1782 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1783 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1784 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1786 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1787 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1789 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1790 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1791 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1794 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1796 ** Improved robustness
1798 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1799 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1801 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1802 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1803 or NFS-mounted partition.
1805 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1806 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1810 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1811 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1812 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1813 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1814 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1815 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1817 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1818 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1820 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1821 or neglect to report file removal.
1823 For the "groups" command:
1825 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1826 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1828 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1830 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1832 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1836 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1837 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1840 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1842 ** Changes in behavior
1844 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1845 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1846 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1847 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1849 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
1850 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1851 a final './' or '../' component.
1853 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1854 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1855 this only for pipes.
1857 ** Infrastructure changes
1859 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1860 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1861 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1862 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1866 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1867 name is "." or "..".
1869 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1870 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1871 dirent.d_type support.
1873 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1874 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1876 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1877 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1878 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1879 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1882 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1884 ** Changes in behavior
1886 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1890 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1891 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1895 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1896 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1897 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1899 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1900 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1902 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1903 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1905 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1907 ** Improved robustness
1909 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1910 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1911 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1913 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1914 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1917 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1918 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1920 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1921 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1923 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1924 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1926 ** Changes in behavior
1928 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1929 where the two are distinct.
1931 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1932 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1933 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1934 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1935 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1936 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1937 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1938 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1939 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1940 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1941 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1942 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1943 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
1944 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
1945 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
1946 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1947 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1949 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1950 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1951 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1953 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1954 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1955 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1956 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1959 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1960 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1964 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1965 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1966 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1967 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1969 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1970 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1971 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1973 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1974 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1975 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1976 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1977 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1980 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1981 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1983 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1984 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1985 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1986 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1988 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1989 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1990 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1992 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1993 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1994 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1995 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1997 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1998 and sticky) with the -m option.
2000 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2001 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2002 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2003 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2004 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2006 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2007 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2009 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2013 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2014 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2015 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2016 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2018 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2020 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2022 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2023 silently ignoring one of them.
2025 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2026 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2027 containing this change was 5.92.
2029 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2030 automatically newline terminated.
2032 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2033 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2034 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2035 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2038 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2039 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2040 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2043 ** Scheduled for removal
2045 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2046 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2048 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2049 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2050 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2051 command to unlink a directory.
2053 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2054 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2055 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2056 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2060 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2061 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2062 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2063 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2064 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2065 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2069 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2070 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2072 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2074 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2075 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2076 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2078 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2079 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2082 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2083 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2085 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2086 list directories before files.
2088 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2089 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2090 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2091 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2094 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2096 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2098 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2099 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2100 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2102 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2103 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2107 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2108 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2109 usually printing nothing.
2111 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2113 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2114 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2115 them with hard-linked directories.
2117 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2118 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2119 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2121 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2122 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2123 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2125 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2128 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2129 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2131 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2132 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2134 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2135 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2137 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2138 all command-line arguments.
2140 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2142 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2144 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2145 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2147 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2149 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2150 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2151 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2152 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2153 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2155 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2156 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2158 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2159 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2160 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2161 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2163 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2165 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2169 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2170 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2172 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2173 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2175 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2176 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2178 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2179 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2181 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2182 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2184 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2186 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2187 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2188 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2191 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2193 ** Build-related bug fixes
2195 installing .mo files would fail
2198 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2202 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2204 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2207 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2211 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2212 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2216 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2218 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2219 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2221 ** Deprecated options
2223 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2224 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2226 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2230 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2232 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2233 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2234 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2235 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2237 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2240 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2246 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2251 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2253 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2255 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2256 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2257 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2259 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2260 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2261 problematic usages. These include:
2263 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2264 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2265 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2266 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2267 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2268 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2269 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2270 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2271 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2273 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2274 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2276 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2277 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2278 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2279 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2281 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2282 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2283 between binary and text files.
2285 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2289 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2293 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2294 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2296 head tac tail tee tr
2297 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2299 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2300 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2302 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2303 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2304 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2306 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2308 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2310 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2311 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2312 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2316 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2318 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2319 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2321 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2322 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2323 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2327 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2328 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2332 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2333 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2334 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2338 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2339 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2343 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2345 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2347 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2351 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2352 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2353 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2355 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2356 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2357 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2358 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2359 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2361 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2365 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2366 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2367 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2369 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2371 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2372 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2373 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2374 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2376 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2378 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2379 rather than silently wrapping around.
2381 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2382 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2384 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2385 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2387 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2388 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2389 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2390 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2392 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2394 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2396 ** Improved robustness
2398 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2399 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2400 no matter how large the result.
2402 ** Improved portability
2404 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2405 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2407 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2409 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2410 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2411 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2413 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2414 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2418 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2419 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2421 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2423 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2424 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2425 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2426 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2428 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2429 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2431 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2432 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2433 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2435 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2437 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2438 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2440 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2441 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2443 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2445 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2446 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2448 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2449 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2451 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2452 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2453 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2455 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2457 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2459 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2463 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2465 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2466 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2467 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2469 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2470 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2472 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2473 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2474 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2476 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2477 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2479 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2480 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2481 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2482 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2484 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2485 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2487 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2488 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2489 the file system does not support it.
2491 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2493 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2494 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2496 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2498 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2499 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2501 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2502 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2503 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2504 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2506 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2507 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2510 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2511 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2512 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2513 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2515 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2516 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2517 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2518 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2520 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2521 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2523 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2525 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2526 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2527 reporting incorrect results.
2531 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2532 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2534 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2537 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2539 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2540 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2542 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2543 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2545 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2548 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2549 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2550 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2551 the file name does not look like a page range.
2553 printf has several changes:
2555 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2556 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2558 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2559 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2560 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2562 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2563 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2566 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2567 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2569 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2570 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2572 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2574 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2575 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2577 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2579 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2581 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2582 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2583 when first encountering the directory.
2587 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2588 output; POSIX requires this.
2590 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2591 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2593 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2595 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2596 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2598 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2599 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2601 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2602 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2603 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2604 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2605 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2606 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2607 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2609 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2610 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2611 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2613 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2614 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2616 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2618 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2620 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2621 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2622 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2623 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2625 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2629 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2630 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2631 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2632 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
2633 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
2635 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2636 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2637 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2639 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2640 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2642 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2643 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2645 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2646 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2647 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2648 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2649 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2651 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2652 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2654 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2655 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2657 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2659 nocreat do not create the output file
2660 excl fail if the output file already exists
2661 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2662 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2664 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2666 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2667 direct use direct I/O for data
2668 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2669 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2670 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2671 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2672 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2674 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2676 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2677 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
2680 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2681 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2682 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2683 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2684 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2685 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2687 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2688 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2690 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2693 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2695 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2697 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2698 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2700 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2701 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2702 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2704 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2705 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2706 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2708 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2710 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2711 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2713 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2714 for compatibility with bash.
2716 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2718 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2719 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2720 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2721 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2723 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2724 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2726 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2727 ls supports TABSIZE.
2728 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2729 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2730 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2732 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2735 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2737 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2738 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2739 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2740 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2741 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2742 an offset, not as a file name.
2744 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2745 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2747 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2748 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2750 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2751 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2753 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2754 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2755 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2757 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2758 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2760 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2761 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2765 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2767 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2769 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2773 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2774 or more arguments between partitions.
2776 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2777 holes in the destination.
2779 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2780 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2781 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2782 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2783 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2784 terminates immediately.
2786 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2788 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2790 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2791 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2792 not the empty string.
2794 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2795 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2799 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2800 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2801 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
2804 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2811 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2815 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2816 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
2818 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2819 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2821 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2822 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2823 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2826 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2830 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2831 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2833 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2834 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2836 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2837 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2838 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2840 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2842 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2845 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2847 ** Configuration option
2849 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2850 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2854 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2855 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2859 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2860 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2861 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2864 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2865 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2866 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2867 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2868 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2869 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2870 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2873 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2877 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2878 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2879 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2881 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2882 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2884 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2886 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2887 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2888 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2889 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2891 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2893 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2894 not just the ones that reference directories
2896 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2897 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2899 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2900 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2901 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2903 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2904 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2905 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2906 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2907 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2908 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2910 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2915 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2916 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2918 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2920 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2922 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2924 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2925 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2927 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2928 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2930 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2932 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2936 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2938 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2940 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2941 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2942 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2943 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2944 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2946 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2947 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2949 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2950 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2952 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2953 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2955 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
2956 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2957 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2961 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
2962 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2963 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
2964 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2965 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2966 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2967 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2968 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2969 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2970 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2971 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2972 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2973 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2974 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2976 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
2978 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2979 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2981 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2983 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2985 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2986 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2988 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2990 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2991 without a trailing newline.
2993 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2994 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2996 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2999 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3003 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3005 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3007 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3008 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3009 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3010 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3012 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3014 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3015 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3016 be printed without leading spaces.
3018 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3019 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3024 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3025 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3026 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3028 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3030 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3031 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3033 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3034 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3036 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3037 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3039 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3041 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3043 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3045 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3046 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3048 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3050 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3052 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3053 byte offsets are specified.
3056 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3059 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3062 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3063 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3064 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3065 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3066 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3067 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3068 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3069 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3070 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3071 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3072 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3073 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3074 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3075 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3076 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3077 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3078 directory where M has write access.
3079 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3080 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3081 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3084 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3085 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3086 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3087 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3088 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3089 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3090 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3091 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3092 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3093 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3094 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3095 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3096 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3097 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3098 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3099 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3100 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3101 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3102 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3103 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3104 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3105 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3106 appeared one additional time.
3108 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3109 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3110 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3111 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3114 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3115 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3116 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3117 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3118 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3119 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3120 if there were more than 338.
3122 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3123 - false --help now exits nonzero
3126 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3127 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3128 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3129 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3132 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3133 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3134 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3135 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3136 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3139 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3140 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3141 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3142 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3143 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3144 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3145 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3148 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3149 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3150 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3151 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3152 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3153 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3155 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3156 under certain unusual conditions
3157 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3158 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3161 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3162 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3163 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3164 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3165 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3166 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3167 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3168 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3169 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3170 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3171 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3172 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3173 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3174 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3175 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3176 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3179 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3180 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3183 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3184 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3185 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3186 involving hard-linked directories
3187 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3188 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3189 character-special and block files
3192 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3193 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3194 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3195 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3196 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3197 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3198 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3199 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3200 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3202 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3203 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3204 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3205 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3206 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3207 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3208 specified on the command line.
3209 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3210 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3211 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3212 the first file untouched.
3213 * readlink: new program
3214 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3215 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3216 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3217 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3218 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3219 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3222 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3223 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3224 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3225 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3226 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3227 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3228 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3229 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3230 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3231 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3232 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3233 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3235 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3236 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3237 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3239 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3240 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3241 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3242 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3243 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3244 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3245 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3246 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3249 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3250 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3253 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3254 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3255 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3256 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3257 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3258 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3259 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3262 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3263 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3265 ========================================================================
3266 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3267 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3270 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3272 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3273 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3274 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3275 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3276 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3277 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3278 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3279 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3280 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3281 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3282 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3283 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3285 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3286 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3287 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3288 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3290 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3293 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3295 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3296 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3297 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3298 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3299 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3300 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3301 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3304 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3305 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3306 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3307 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3308 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3309 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3310 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3311 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3312 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3313 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3314 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3315 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3316 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3317 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3318 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3319 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3321 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3322 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3324 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3325 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3326 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3327 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3328 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3329 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3331 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3332 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3333 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3334 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3335 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3336 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3337 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3339 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3340 the source files in the following example:
3341 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3342 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3343 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3344 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3345 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3346 links between source files with --preserve=links
3347 * cp accepts new options:
3348 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3349 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3350 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3351 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3352 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3353 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3354 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3355 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3356 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3358 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3359 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3360 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3361 even though it's older than dest.
3362 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3363 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3364 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3365 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3366 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3368 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3369 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3370 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3371 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3372 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3373 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3374 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3376 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3377 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3378 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3380 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3381 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3382 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3383 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3384 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3385 This is the default.
3387 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3388 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3389 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3390 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3391 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3393 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3396 ========================================================================
3397 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3398 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3401 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3402 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3404 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3405 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3406 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3407 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3408 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3410 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3411 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3412 that specifies a non-directory
3415 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3416 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3417 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3418 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3419 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3420 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3421 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3422 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3423 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3424 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3425 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3426 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3427 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3428 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3429 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3430 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3431 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3432 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3433 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3434 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3435 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3436 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3437 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3438 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3440 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3441 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3442 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3444 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3446 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3447 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3449 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3450 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3451 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3452 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3453 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3455 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3456 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3457 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3458 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3459 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3461 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3463 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3464 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3465 * still more portability fixes
3466 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3467 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3469 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3471 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3473 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3475 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3476 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3477 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3478 there is any time remaining
3479 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3481 ========================================================================
3482 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3483 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3485 This package began as the union of the following:
3486 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3488 ========================================================================
3490 Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3492 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3493 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3494 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3495 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3496 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3497 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.