1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
8 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
9 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
11 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
12 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
14 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
15 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
16 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
17 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
18 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
20 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
21 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
23 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
24 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
26 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
27 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
28 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
30 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
31 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
32 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
33 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
35 ** Changes in behavior
37 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
38 when -v or -c specified.
42 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
43 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
44 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
46 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
47 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
48 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
49 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
50 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
51 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
52 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
54 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
55 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
56 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
60 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
63 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
64 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
66 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
67 For example `shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2` no longer exhausts memory.
69 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
71 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
75 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
76 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
79 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
83 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
84 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
86 ** Changes in behavior
88 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
89 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
90 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
91 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
92 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
93 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
95 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
96 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
97 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
101 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
104 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
108 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
109 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
110 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
112 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
113 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
114 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
116 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
117 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
118 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
120 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
121 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
123 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
124 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
126 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
127 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
129 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
130 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
134 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
135 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
136 processed portion thereof.
138 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
139 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
141 ** Changes in behavior
143 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
144 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
145 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
147 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
148 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
149 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
151 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
152 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
154 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
155 Use --preserve-context instead.
157 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
160 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
164 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
165 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
166 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
167 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
168 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
170 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
171 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
173 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
174 reject file names invalid for that file system.
176 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
177 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
181 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
182 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
183 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
184 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
185 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
186 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
187 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
188 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
190 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
191 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
192 the same number of fields are output for each line.
194 ** Changes in behavior
196 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
197 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
198 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
201 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
205 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
206 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
207 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
210 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
214 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
215 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
217 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
218 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
220 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
221 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
223 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
224 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
225 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
226 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
228 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
229 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
231 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
232 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
233 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
235 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
237 ** Changes in behavior
239 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
240 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
241 to the number of available processors.
245 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
248 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
252 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
253 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
254 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
255 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
257 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
258 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
259 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
261 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
262 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
264 ** Changes in behavior
266 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
267 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
269 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
270 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
271 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
272 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
273 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
274 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
276 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
277 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
278 the same way as the others.
281 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
285 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
286 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
287 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
289 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
290 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
292 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
293 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
294 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
296 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
297 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
299 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
300 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
302 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
303 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
304 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
306 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
307 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
308 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
309 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
313 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
314 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
316 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
319 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
320 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
322 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
324 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
325 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
326 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
328 ** Changes in behavior
330 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
331 rather than its aliased target.
333 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
334 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
335 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
337 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
338 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
339 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
340 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
341 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
342 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
343 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
344 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
346 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
348 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
350 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
351 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
354 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
355 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
356 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
357 control like taskset for example.
359 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
361 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
362 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
363 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
364 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
365 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
366 includes %C when context information is available.
368 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
369 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
370 rather than a file system attribute.
372 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
373 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
374 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
375 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
377 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
378 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
379 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
381 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
382 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
383 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
386 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
390 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
391 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
393 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
395 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
396 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
398 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
399 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
400 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
401 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
403 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
404 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
405 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
409 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
410 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
412 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
413 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
414 duration after the initial signal was sent.
416 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
417 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
418 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
419 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
420 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
421 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
422 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
423 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
424 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
426 ** Changes in behavior
428 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
429 sequence when it would be a no-op.
431 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
432 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
435 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
439 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
440 of available processors, which may not have been the case
441 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
442 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
446 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
447 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
449 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
450 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
451 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
452 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
454 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
455 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
456 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
459 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
463 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
464 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
465 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
467 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
468 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
469 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
471 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
472 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
474 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
475 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
476 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
477 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
479 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
480 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
481 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
483 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
484 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
485 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
486 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
488 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
489 renamed-aside and then recreated.
490 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
492 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
493 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
494 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
495 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
497 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
498 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
499 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
501 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
502 processes will not intersperse their output.
503 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
506 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
510 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
511 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
513 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
514 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
516 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
517 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
518 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
519 the presence of the empty string argument.
520 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
522 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
523 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
524 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
525 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
527 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
528 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
530 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
531 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
532 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
534 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
535 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
536 and with a malicious user on the same system
537 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
538 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
541 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
545 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
546 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
547 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
549 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
550 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
551 offending directory and all "contents."
553 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
554 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
555 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
557 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
558 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
559 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
561 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
562 processes will not intersperse their output.
563 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
564 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
566 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
567 output the name of the file to stdout.
568 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
570 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
571 call fails with errno == EACCES.
572 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
574 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
575 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
578 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
579 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
580 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
582 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
583 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
584 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
585 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
586 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
587 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
589 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
590 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
591 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
592 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
594 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
595 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
597 ** Changes in behavior
599 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
600 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
601 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
602 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
603 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
605 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
606 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
607 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
608 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
610 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
612 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
613 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
614 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
615 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
616 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
620 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
624 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
625 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
627 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
628 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
630 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
631 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
632 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
634 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
635 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
638 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
642 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
643 when the source file doesn't have write access.
644 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
646 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
647 to accommodate leap seconds.
648 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
650 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
651 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
652 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
654 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
656 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
657 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
658 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
660 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
661 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
662 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
663 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
664 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
668 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
669 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
670 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
671 directory or a symlink to a directory.
673 ** Changes in behavior
675 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
676 environment variable is set.
678 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
679 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
680 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
684 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
685 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
686 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
687 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
689 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
690 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
691 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
692 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
696 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
697 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
698 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
700 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
701 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
702 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
703 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
704 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
705 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
708 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
709 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
712 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
716 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
717 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
718 and libraries tested at configure time.
719 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
721 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
722 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
724 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
725 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
727 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
728 printing a summary to stderr.
729 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
731 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
732 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
733 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
735 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
736 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
738 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
739 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
740 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
741 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
743 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
744 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
745 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
746 which is relatively unusual.
747 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
749 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
750 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
751 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
752 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
753 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
754 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
755 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
759 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
760 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
761 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
762 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
763 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
767 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
768 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
770 ** Changes in behavior
772 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
773 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
774 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
775 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
776 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
779 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
783 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
784 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
786 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
787 before data copying has started.
789 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
790 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
792 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
793 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
794 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
795 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
797 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
798 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
799 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
800 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
802 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
807 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
808 for its standard streams.
810 ** Changes in behavior
812 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
813 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
814 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
815 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
816 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
817 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
819 ** Deprecated options
821 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
822 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
826 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
828 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
829 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
832 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
834 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
835 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
837 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
838 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
841 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
845 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
846 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
847 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
848 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
850 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
851 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
852 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
853 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
854 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
859 make check: two tests have been corrected
863 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
864 inherited from gnulib.
867 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
871 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
872 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
873 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
874 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
876 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
877 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
879 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
881 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
882 systems without xattr support.
884 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
885 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
886 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
888 ** Changes in behavior
890 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
891 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
892 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
893 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
895 ** Improved robustness
897 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
898 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
899 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
900 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
901 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
902 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
903 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
904 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
905 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
909 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
910 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
912 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
913 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
914 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
915 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
916 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
919 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
923 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
924 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
925 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
929 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
930 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
931 data was read, or on process exit.
932 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
934 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
935 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
936 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
937 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
939 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
940 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
941 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
942 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
944 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
945 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
947 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
948 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
950 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
951 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
952 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
954 ** Changes in behavior
956 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
957 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
958 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
960 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
961 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
963 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
964 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
965 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
968 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
972 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
974 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
975 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
976 install: Never copies xattrs
978 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
979 from overwriting any existing destination file
981 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
982 mode where this feature is available.
984 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
985 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
986 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
987 do not modify the destination at all.
989 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
991 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
995 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
996 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
998 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1000 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1001 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1003 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1004 processing the first file name
1006 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1007 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1008 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1009 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1011 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1012 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1014 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1015 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1018 ** Changes in behavior
1020 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1021 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1023 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1024 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1025 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1027 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1028 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1030 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1032 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1033 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1034 is still marked with a '+'.
1037 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1041 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1042 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1046 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1047 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1048 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1049 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1050 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1051 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1053 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1054 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1056 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1057 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1059 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1061 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1062 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1063 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1065 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1066 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1068 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1069 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1070 used to factor large numbers.
1072 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1075 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1077 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1079 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1080 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1082 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1083 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1084 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1085 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1087 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1088 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1089 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1091 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1092 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1096 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1098 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1099 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1101 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1102 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1104 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1106 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1107 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1111 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1112 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1113 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1115 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1117 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1118 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1119 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1121 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1122 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1123 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1125 ** Changes in behavior
1127 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1128 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1131 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1135 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1137 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1138 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1139 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1141 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1142 with no USERNAME argument.
1144 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1145 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1146 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1148 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1149 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1150 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1151 number of fields for some inputs.
1153 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1154 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1156 ** Changes in behavior
1158 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1159 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1162 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1166 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1168 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1169 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1170 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1171 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1173 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1174 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1176 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1177 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1179 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1180 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1182 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1183 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1184 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1185 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1187 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1188 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1189 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1190 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1191 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1192 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1194 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1195 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1197 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1198 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1199 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1201 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1202 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1204 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1205 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1207 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1208 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1209 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1210 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1212 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1213 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1215 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1216 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1218 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1219 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1220 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1224 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1225 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1227 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1228 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1229 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1230 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1234 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1235 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1237 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1239 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1243 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1244 which have negative errno values.
1248 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1252 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1256 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1257 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1260 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1264 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1265 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1266 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1268 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1269 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1270 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1271 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1275 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1276 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1277 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1278 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1281 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1285 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1287 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1288 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1289 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1292 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1296 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1297 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1299 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1301 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1303 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1305 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1309 ** Changes in behavior
1311 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1312 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1314 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1315 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1317 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1318 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1319 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1323 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1324 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1325 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1326 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1327 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1328 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1329 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1330 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1331 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1332 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1333 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1335 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1336 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1337 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1340 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1343 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1344 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1345 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1347 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1348 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1349 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1352 ** New build options
1354 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1355 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1356 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1357 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1359 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1360 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1361 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1362 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1363 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1364 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1365 of "make check" fail.
1367 ** Remove deprecated options
1369 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1370 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1371 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1372 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1373 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1375 ** Improved robustness
1377 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1378 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1379 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1380 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1381 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1382 loss of the contents of a/f.
1384 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1385 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1389 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1390 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1391 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1393 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1394 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1395 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1396 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1398 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1399 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1400 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1401 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1402 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1403 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1404 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1405 destination is a symlink.
1407 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1409 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1410 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1412 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1413 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1415 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1417 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1418 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1420 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1421 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1423 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1426 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1427 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1429 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1430 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1432 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1433 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1434 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1435 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1437 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1438 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1439 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1441 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1442 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1443 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1445 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1446 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1447 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1448 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1450 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1451 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1452 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1454 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1455 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1457 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1458 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1460 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1462 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1463 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1464 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1466 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1467 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1469 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1470 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1472 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1473 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1475 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1476 [present in the original version]
1479 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1483 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1485 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1486 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1487 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1489 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1490 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1492 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1496 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1497 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1499 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1500 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1502 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1503 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1505 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1506 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1507 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1508 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1509 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1510 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1512 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1513 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1516 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1517 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1519 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1522 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1523 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1524 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1526 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1527 directory is unreadable.
1529 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1530 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1531 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1533 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1534 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1535 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1536 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1537 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1540 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1541 Before it would print nothing.
1543 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1545 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1546 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1547 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1548 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1549 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1550 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1551 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1552 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1554 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1558 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1559 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1560 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1562 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1563 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1564 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1565 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1568 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1572 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1573 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1574 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1575 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1576 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1577 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1578 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1580 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1581 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1582 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1583 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1584 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1585 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1586 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1587 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1589 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1590 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1591 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1594 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1598 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1599 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1601 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1602 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1603 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1605 ** Improved robustness
1607 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1608 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1609 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1612 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1616 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1617 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1618 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1619 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1620 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1622 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1626 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1629 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1633 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1634 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1635 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1636 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1638 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1639 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1641 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1642 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1643 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1646 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1648 ** Improved robustness
1650 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1651 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1653 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1654 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1655 or NFS-mounted partition.
1657 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1658 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1662 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1663 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1664 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1665 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1666 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1667 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1669 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1670 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1672 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1673 or neglect to report file removal.
1675 For the "groups" command:
1677 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1678 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1680 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1682 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1684 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1688 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1689 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1692 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1694 ** Changes in behavior
1696 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1697 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1698 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1699 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1701 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1702 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1703 a final `./' or `../' component.
1705 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1706 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1707 this only for pipes.
1709 ** Infrastructure changes
1711 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1712 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1713 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1714 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1718 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1719 name is "." or "..".
1721 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1722 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1723 dirent.d_type support.
1725 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1726 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1728 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1729 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1730 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1731 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1734 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1736 ** Changes in behavior
1738 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1742 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1743 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1747 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1748 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1749 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1751 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1752 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1754 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1755 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1757 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1759 ** Improved robustness
1761 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1762 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1763 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1765 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1766 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1769 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1770 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1772 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1773 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1775 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1776 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1778 ** Changes in behavior
1780 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1781 where the two are distinct.
1783 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1784 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1785 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1786 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1787 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1788 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1789 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1790 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1791 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1792 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1793 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1794 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1795 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1796 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1797 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1798 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1799 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1801 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1802 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1803 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1805 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1806 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1807 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1808 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1811 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1812 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1816 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1817 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1818 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1819 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1821 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1822 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1823 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1825 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1826 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1827 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1828 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1829 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1832 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1833 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1835 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1836 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1837 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1838 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1840 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1841 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1842 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1844 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1845 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1846 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1847 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1849 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1850 and sticky) with the -m option.
1852 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1853 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1854 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1855 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1856 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1858 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1859 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1861 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1865 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1866 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1867 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1868 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1870 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1872 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1874 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1875 silently ignoring one of them.
1877 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1878 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1879 containing this change was 5.92.
1881 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1882 automatically newline terminated.
1884 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1885 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1886 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1887 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1890 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1891 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1892 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1895 ** Scheduled for removal
1897 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1898 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1900 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1901 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1902 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1903 command to unlink a directory.
1905 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1906 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1907 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1908 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1912 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1913 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1914 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1915 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1916 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1917 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1921 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1922 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1924 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1926 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1927 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1928 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1930 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1931 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1934 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1935 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1937 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1938 list directories before files.
1940 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1941 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1942 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1943 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1946 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1948 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1950 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1951 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1952 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1954 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1955 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1959 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1960 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1961 usually printing nothing.
1963 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1965 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1966 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1967 them with hard-linked directories.
1969 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1970 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1971 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1973 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1974 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1975 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1977 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1980 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1981 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1983 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1984 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1986 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1987 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1989 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1990 all command-line arguments.
1992 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1994 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1996 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1997 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1999 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2001 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2002 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2003 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2004 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2005 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2007 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2008 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2010 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2011 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2012 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2013 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2015 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2017 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2021 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2022 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2024 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2025 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2027 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
2028 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2030 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2031 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
2033 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2034 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2036 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2038 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2039 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2040 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2043 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2045 ** Build-related bug fixes
2047 installing .mo files would fail
2050 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2054 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2056 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2059 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2063 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2064 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2068 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2070 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2071 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2073 ** Deprecated options
2075 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2076 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
2078 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2082 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2084 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2085 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2086 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2087 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2089 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2092 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2098 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2103 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2105 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2107 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2108 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2109 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2111 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2112 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2113 problematic usages. These include:
2115 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2116 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2117 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2118 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2119 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2120 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2121 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2122 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2123 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2125 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2126 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2128 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2129 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2130 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2131 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2133 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2134 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2135 between binary and text files.
2137 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2141 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2145 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2146 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2148 head tac tail tee tr
2149 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2151 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2152 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2154 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2155 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2156 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2158 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2160 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2162 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2163 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2164 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2168 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2170 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2171 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2173 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2174 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2175 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2179 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2180 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2184 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2185 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2186 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2190 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2191 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2195 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2197 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2199 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2203 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2204 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2205 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2207 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2208 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2209 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2210 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2211 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2213 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2217 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2218 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2219 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2221 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2223 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2224 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2225 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2226 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2228 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2230 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2231 rather than silently wrapping around.
2233 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2234 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2236 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2237 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2239 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2240 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2241 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2242 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2244 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2246 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2248 ** Improved robustness
2250 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2251 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2252 no matter how large the result.
2254 ** Improved portability
2256 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2257 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2259 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2261 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2262 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2263 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2265 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2266 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2270 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2271 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2273 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2275 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2276 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2277 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2278 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2280 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2281 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2283 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2284 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2285 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2287 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2289 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2290 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2292 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2293 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2295 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2297 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2298 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2300 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2301 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2303 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2304 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2305 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2307 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2309 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2311 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2315 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2317 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2318 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2319 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2321 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2322 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2324 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2325 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2326 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2328 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2329 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2331 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2332 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2333 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2334 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2336 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2337 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2339 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2340 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2341 the file system does not support it.
2343 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2345 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2346 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2348 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2350 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2351 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2353 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2354 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2355 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2356 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2358 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2359 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2362 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2363 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2364 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2365 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2367 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2368 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2369 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2370 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2372 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2373 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2375 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2377 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2378 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2379 reporting incorrect results.
2383 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2384 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2386 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2389 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2391 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2392 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2394 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2395 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2397 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2400 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2401 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2402 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2403 the file name does not look like a page range.
2405 printf has several changes:
2407 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2408 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2410 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2411 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2412 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2414 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2415 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2418 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2419 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2421 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2422 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2424 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2426 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2427 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2429 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2431 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2433 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2434 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2435 when first encountering the directory.
2439 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2440 output; POSIX requires this.
2442 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2443 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2445 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2447 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2448 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2450 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2451 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2453 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2454 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2455 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2456 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2457 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2458 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2459 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2461 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2462 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2463 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2465 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2466 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2468 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2470 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2472 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2473 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2474 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2475 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2477 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2481 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2482 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2483 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2484 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2485 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2487 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2488 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2489 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2491 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2492 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2494 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2495 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2497 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2498 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2499 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2500 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2501 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2503 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2504 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2506 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2507 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2509 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2511 nocreat do not create the output file
2512 excl fail if the output file already exists
2513 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2514 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2516 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2518 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2519 direct use direct I/O for data
2520 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2521 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2522 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2523 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2524 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2526 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2528 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2529 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2532 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2533 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2534 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2535 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2536 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2537 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2539 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2540 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2542 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2545 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2547 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2549 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2550 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2552 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2553 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2554 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2556 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2557 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2558 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2560 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2562 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2563 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2565 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2566 for compatibility with bash.
2568 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2570 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2571 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2572 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2573 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2575 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2576 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2578 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2579 ls supports TABSIZE.
2580 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2581 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2582 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2584 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2587 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2589 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2590 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2591 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2592 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2593 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2594 an offset, not as a file name.
2596 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2597 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2599 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2600 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2602 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2603 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2605 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2606 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2607 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2609 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2610 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2612 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2613 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2617 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2619 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2621 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2625 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2626 or more arguments between partitions.
2628 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2629 holes in the destination.
2631 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2632 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2633 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2634 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2635 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2636 terminates immediately.
2638 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2640 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2642 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2643 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2644 not the empty string.
2646 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2647 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2651 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2652 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2653 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2656 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2663 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2667 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2668 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2670 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2671 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2673 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2674 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2675 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2678 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2682 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2683 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2685 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2686 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2688 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2689 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2690 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2692 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2694 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2697 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2699 ** Configuration option
2701 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2702 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2706 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2707 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2711 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2712 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2713 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2716 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2717 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2718 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2719 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2720 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2721 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2722 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2725 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2729 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2730 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2731 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2733 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2734 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2736 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2738 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2739 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2740 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2741 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2743 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2745 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2746 not just the ones that reference directories
2748 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2749 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2751 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2752 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2753 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2755 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2756 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2757 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2758 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2759 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2760 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2762 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2767 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2768 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2770 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2772 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2774 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2776 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2777 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2779 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2780 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2782 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2784 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2788 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2790 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2792 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2793 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2794 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2795 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2796 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2798 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2799 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2801 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2802 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2804 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2805 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2807 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2808 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2809 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2813 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2814 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2815 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2816 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2817 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2818 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2819 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2820 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2821 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2822 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2823 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2824 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2825 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2826 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2828 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2830 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2831 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2833 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2835 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2837 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2838 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2840 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2842 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2843 without a trailing newline.
2845 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2846 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2848 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2851 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2855 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2857 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2859 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2860 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2861 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2862 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2864 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2866 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2867 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2868 be printed without leading spaces.
2870 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2871 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2876 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2877 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2878 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2880 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2882 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2883 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2885 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2886 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2888 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2889 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2891 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2893 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2895 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2897 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2898 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2900 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2902 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2904 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2905 byte offsets are specified.
2908 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2911 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2914 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2915 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2916 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2917 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2918 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2919 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2920 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2921 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2922 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2923 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2924 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2925 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2926 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2927 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2928 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2929 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2930 directory where M has write access.
2931 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2932 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2933 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2936 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2937 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2938 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2939 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2940 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2941 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2942 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2943 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2944 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2945 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2946 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2947 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2948 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2949 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2950 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2951 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2952 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2953 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2954 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2955 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2956 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2957 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2958 appeared one additional time.
2960 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2961 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2962 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2963 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2966 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2967 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2968 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2969 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2970 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2971 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2972 if there were more than 338.
2974 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2975 - false --help now exits nonzero
2978 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2979 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2980 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2981 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2984 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2985 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2986 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2987 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2988 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2991 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2992 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2993 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2994 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2995 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2996 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2997 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3000 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3001 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3002 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3003 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3004 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3005 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3007 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3008 under certain unusual conditions
3009 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3010 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3013 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3014 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3015 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3016 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3017 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3018 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
3019 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3020 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3021 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
3022 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
3023 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3024 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3025 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3026 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3027 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3028 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3031 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3032 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3035 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3036 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3037 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3038 involving hard-linked directories
3039 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3040 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
3041 character-special and block files
3044 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3045 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3046 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3047 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3048 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3049 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3050 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3051 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3052 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3054 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
3055 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
3056 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3057 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3058 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3059 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3060 specified on the command line.
3061 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3062 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
3063 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3064 the first file untouched.
3065 * readlink: new program
3066 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3067 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3068 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3069 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3070 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3071 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3074 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3075 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3076 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3077 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3078 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3079 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3080 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3081 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3082 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3083 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3084 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3085 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3087 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3088 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3089 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3091 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3092 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3093 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3094 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3095 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3096 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3097 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3098 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3101 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3102 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3105 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3106 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3107 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3108 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3109 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3110 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3111 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3114 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3115 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3117 ========================================================================
3118 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3119 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3122 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3124 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3125 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3126 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3127 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3128 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3129 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3130 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3131 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3132 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3133 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3134 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3135 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3137 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3138 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3139 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3140 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3142 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3145 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3147 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3148 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3149 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3150 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3151 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3152 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3153 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3156 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3157 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3158 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3159 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3160 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3161 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3162 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3163 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3164 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3165 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3166 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3167 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3168 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3169 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3170 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3171 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3173 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3174 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3176 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3177 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3178 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3179 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3180 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3181 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3183 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3184 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3185 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3186 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3187 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3188 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3189 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3191 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3192 the source files in the following example:
3193 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3194 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3195 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3196 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3197 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3198 links between source files with --preserve=links
3199 * cp accepts new options:
3200 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3201 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3202 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3203 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3204 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3205 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3206 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3207 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3208 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3210 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3211 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3212 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3213 even though it's older than dest.
3214 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3215 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3216 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3217 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3218 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3220 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3221 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3222 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3223 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3224 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3225 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3226 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3228 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3229 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3230 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3232 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3233 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3234 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3235 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3236 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3237 This is the default.
3239 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3240 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3241 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3242 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3243 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3245 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3248 ========================================================================
3249 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3250 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3253 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3254 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3256 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3257 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3258 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3259 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3260 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3262 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3263 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3264 that specifies a non-directory
3267 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3268 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3269 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3270 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3271 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3272 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3273 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3274 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3275 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3276 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3277 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3278 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3279 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3280 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3281 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3282 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3283 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3284 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3285 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3286 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3287 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3288 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3289 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3290 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3292 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3293 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3294 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3296 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3298 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3299 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3301 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3302 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3303 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3304 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3305 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3307 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3308 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3309 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3310 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3311 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3313 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3315 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3316 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3317 * still more portability fixes
3318 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3319 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3321 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3323 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3325 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3327 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3328 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3329 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3330 there is any time remaining
3331 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3333 ========================================================================
3334 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3335 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3337 This package began as the union of the following:
3338 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3340 ========================================================================
3342 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3344 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3345 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3346 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3347 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3348 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3349 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.