1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
8 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
9 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
11 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
12 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
14 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
15 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
17 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
18 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
20 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
21 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
25 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
26 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
27 processed portion thereof.
29 ** Changes in behavior
31 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
34 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
38 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
39 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
40 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
41 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
42 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
44 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
45 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
47 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
48 reject file names invalid for that file system.
50 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
51 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
55 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
56 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
57 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
58 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
59 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
60 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
61 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
62 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
64 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
65 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
66 the same number of fields are output for each line.
68 ** Changes in behavior
70 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
71 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
72 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
75 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
79 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
80 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
81 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
84 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
88 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
89 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
91 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
92 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
94 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
95 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
97 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
98 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
99 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
100 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
102 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
103 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
105 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
106 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
107 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
109 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
111 ** Changes in behavior
113 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
114 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
115 to the number of available processors.
119 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
122 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
126 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
127 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
128 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
129 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
131 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
132 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
133 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
135 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
136 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
138 ** Changes in behavior
140 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
141 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
143 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
144 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
145 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
146 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
147 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
148 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
150 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
151 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
152 the same way as the others.
155 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
159 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
160 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
161 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
163 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
164 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
166 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
167 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
168 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
170 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
171 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
173 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
174 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
176 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
177 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
178 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
180 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
181 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
182 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
183 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
187 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
188 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
190 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
193 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
194 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
196 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
198 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
199 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
200 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
202 ** Changes in behavior
204 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
205 rather than its aliased target.
207 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
208 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
209 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
211 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
212 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
213 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
214 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
215 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
216 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
217 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
218 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
220 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
222 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
224 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
225 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
228 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
229 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
230 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
231 control like taskset for example.
233 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
235 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
236 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
237 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
238 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
239 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
240 includes %C when context information is available.
242 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
243 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
244 rather than a file system attribute.
246 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
247 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
248 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
249 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
251 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
252 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
253 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
255 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
256 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
257 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
260 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
264 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
265 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
267 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
269 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
270 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
272 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
273 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
274 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
275 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
277 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
278 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
279 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
283 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
284 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
286 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
287 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
288 duration after the initial signal was sent.
290 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
291 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
292 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
293 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
294 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
295 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
296 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
297 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
298 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
300 ** Changes in behavior
302 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
303 sequence when it would be a no-op.
305 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
306 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
309 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
313 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
314 of available processors, which may not have been the case
315 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
316 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
320 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
321 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
323 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
324 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
325 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
326 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
328 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
329 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
330 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
333 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
337 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
338 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
339 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
341 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
342 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
343 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
345 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
346 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
348 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
349 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
350 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
351 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
353 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
354 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
355 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
357 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
358 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
359 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
360 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
362 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
363 renamed-aside and then recreated.
364 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
366 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
367 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
368 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
369 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
371 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
372 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
373 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
375 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
376 processes will not intersperse their output.
377 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
380 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
384 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
385 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
387 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
388 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
390 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
391 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
392 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
393 the presence of the empty string argument.
394 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
396 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
397 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
398 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
399 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
401 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
402 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
404 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
405 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
406 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
408 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
409 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
410 and with a malicious user on the same system
411 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
412 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
415 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
419 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
420 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
421 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
423 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
424 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
425 offending directory and all "contents."
427 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
428 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
429 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
431 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
432 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
433 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
435 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
436 processes will not intersperse their output.
437 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
438 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
440 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
441 output the name of the file to stdout.
442 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
444 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
445 call fails with errno == EACCES.
446 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
448 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
449 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
452 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
453 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
454 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
456 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
457 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
458 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
459 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
460 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
461 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
463 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
464 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
465 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
466 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
468 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
469 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
471 ** Changes in behavior
473 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
474 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
475 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
476 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
477 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
479 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
480 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
481 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
482 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
484 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
486 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
487 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
488 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
489 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
490 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
494 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
498 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
499 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
501 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
502 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
504 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
505 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
506 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
508 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
509 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
512 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
516 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
517 when the source file doesn't have write access.
518 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
520 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
521 to accommodate leap seconds.
522 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
524 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
525 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
526 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
528 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
530 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
531 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
532 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
534 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
535 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
536 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
537 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
538 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
542 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
543 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
544 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
545 directory or a symlink to a directory.
547 ** Changes in behavior
549 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
550 environment variable is set.
552 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
553 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
554 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
558 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
559 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
560 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
561 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
563 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
564 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
565 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
566 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
570 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
571 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
572 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
574 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
575 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
576 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
577 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
578 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
579 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
582 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
583 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
586 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
590 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
591 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
592 and libraries tested at configure time.
593 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
595 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
596 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
598 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
599 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
601 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
602 printing a summary to stderr.
603 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
605 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
606 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
607 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
609 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
610 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
612 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
613 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
614 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
615 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
617 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
618 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
619 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
620 which is relatively unusual.
621 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
623 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
624 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
625 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
626 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
627 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
628 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
629 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
633 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
634 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
635 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
636 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
637 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
641 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
642 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
644 ** Changes in behavior
646 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
647 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
648 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
649 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
650 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
653 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
657 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
658 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
660 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
661 before data copying has started.
663 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
664 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
666 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
667 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
668 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
669 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
671 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
672 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
673 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
674 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
676 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
681 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
682 for its standard streams.
684 ** Changes in behavior
686 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
687 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
688 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
689 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
690 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
691 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
693 ** Deprecated options
695 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
696 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
700 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
702 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
703 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
706 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
708 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
709 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
711 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
712 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
715 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
719 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
720 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
721 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
722 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
724 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
725 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
726 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
727 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
728 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
733 make check: two tests have been corrected
737 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
738 inherited from gnulib.
741 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
745 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
746 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
747 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
748 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
750 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
751 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
753 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
755 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
756 systems without xattr support.
758 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
759 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
760 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
762 ** Changes in behavior
764 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
765 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
766 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
767 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
769 ** Improved robustness
771 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
772 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
773 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
774 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
775 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
776 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
777 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
778 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
779 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
783 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
784 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
786 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
787 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
788 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
789 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
790 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
793 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
797 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
798 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
799 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
803 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
804 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
805 data was read, or on process exit.
806 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
808 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
809 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
810 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
811 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
813 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
814 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
815 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
816 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
818 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
819 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
821 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
822 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
824 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
825 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
826 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
828 ** Changes in behavior
830 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
831 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
832 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
834 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
835 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
837 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
838 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
839 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
842 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
846 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
848 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
849 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
850 install: Never copies xattrs
852 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
853 from overwriting any existing destination file
855 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
856 mode where this feature is available.
858 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
859 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
860 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
861 do not modify the destination at all.
863 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
865 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
869 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
870 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
872 cp uses much less memory in some situations
874 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
875 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
877 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
878 processing the first file name
880 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
881 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
882 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
883 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
885 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
886 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
888 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
889 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
892 ** Changes in behavior
894 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
895 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
897 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
898 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
899 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
901 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
902 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
904 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
906 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
907 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
908 is still marked with a '+'.
911 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
915 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
916 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
920 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
921 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
922 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
923 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
924 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
925 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
927 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
928 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
930 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
931 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
933 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
935 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
936 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
937 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
939 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
940 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
942 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
943 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
944 used to factor large numbers.
946 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
949 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
951 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
953 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
954 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
956 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
957 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
958 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
959 maximum command-line (argv) length.
961 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
962 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
963 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
965 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
966 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
970 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
972 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
973 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
975 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
976 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
978 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
980 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
981 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
985 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
986 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
987 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
989 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
991 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
992 no matter how many files are in a given directory
994 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
995 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
996 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
998 ** Changes in behavior
1000 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1001 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1004 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1008 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1010 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1011 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1012 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1014 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1015 with no USERNAME argument.
1017 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1018 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1019 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1021 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1022 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1023 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1024 number of fields for some inputs.
1026 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1027 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1029 ** Changes in behavior
1031 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1032 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1035 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1039 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1041 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1042 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1043 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1044 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1046 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1047 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1049 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1050 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1052 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1053 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1055 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1056 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1057 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1058 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1060 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1061 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1062 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1063 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1064 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1065 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1067 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1068 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1070 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1071 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1072 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1074 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1075 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1077 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1078 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1080 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1081 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1082 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1083 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1085 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1086 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1088 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1089 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1091 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1092 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1093 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1097 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1098 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1100 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1101 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1102 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1103 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1107 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1108 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1110 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1112 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1116 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1117 which have negative errno values.
1121 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1125 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1129 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1130 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1133 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1137 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1138 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1139 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1141 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1142 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1143 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1144 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1148 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1149 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1150 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1151 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1154 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1158 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1160 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1161 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1162 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1165 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1169 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1170 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1172 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1174 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1176 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1178 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1182 ** Changes in behavior
1184 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1185 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1187 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1188 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1190 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1191 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1192 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1196 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1197 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1198 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1199 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1200 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1201 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1202 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1203 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1204 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1205 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1206 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1208 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1209 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1210 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1213 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1216 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1217 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1218 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1220 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1221 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1222 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1225 ** New build options
1227 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1228 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1229 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1230 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1232 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1233 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1234 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1235 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1236 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1237 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1238 of "make check" fail.
1240 ** Remove deprecated options
1242 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1243 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1244 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1245 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1246 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1248 ** Improved robustness
1250 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1251 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1252 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1253 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1254 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1255 loss of the contents of a/f.
1257 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1258 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1262 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1263 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1264 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1266 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1267 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1268 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1269 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1271 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1272 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1273 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1274 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1275 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1276 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1277 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1278 destination is a symlink.
1280 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1282 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1283 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1285 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1286 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1288 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1290 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1291 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1293 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1294 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1296 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1299 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1300 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1302 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1303 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1305 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1306 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1307 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1308 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1310 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1311 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1312 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1314 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1315 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1316 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1318 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1319 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1320 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1321 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1323 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1324 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1325 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1327 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1328 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1330 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1331 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1333 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1335 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1336 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1337 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1339 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1340 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1342 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1343 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1345 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1346 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1348 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1349 [present in the original version]
1352 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1356 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1358 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1359 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1360 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1362 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1363 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1365 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1369 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1370 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1372 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1373 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1375 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1376 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1378 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1379 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1380 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1381 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1382 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1383 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1385 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1386 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1389 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1390 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1392 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1395 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1396 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1397 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1399 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1400 directory is unreadable.
1402 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1403 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1404 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1406 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1407 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1408 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1409 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1410 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1413 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1414 Before it would print nothing.
1416 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1418 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1419 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1420 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1421 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1422 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1423 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1424 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1425 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1427 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1431 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1432 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1433 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1435 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1436 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1437 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1438 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1441 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1445 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1446 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1447 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1448 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1449 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1450 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1451 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1453 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1454 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1455 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1456 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1457 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1458 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1459 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1460 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1462 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1463 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1464 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1467 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1471 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1472 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1474 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1475 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1476 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1478 ** Improved robustness
1480 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1481 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1482 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1485 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1489 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1490 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1491 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1492 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1493 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1495 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1499 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1502 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1506 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1507 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1508 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1509 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1511 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1512 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1514 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1515 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1516 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1519 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1521 ** Improved robustness
1523 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1524 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1526 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1527 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1528 or NFS-mounted partition.
1530 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1531 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1535 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1536 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1537 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1538 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1539 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1540 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1542 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1543 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1545 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1546 or neglect to report file removal.
1548 For the "groups" command:
1550 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1551 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1553 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1555 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1557 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1561 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1562 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1565 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1567 ** Changes in behavior
1569 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1570 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1571 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1572 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1574 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1575 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1576 a final `./' or `../' component.
1578 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1579 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1580 this only for pipes.
1582 ** Infrastructure changes
1584 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1585 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1586 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1587 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1591 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1592 name is "." or "..".
1594 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1595 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1596 dirent.d_type support.
1598 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1599 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1601 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1602 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1603 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1604 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1607 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1609 ** Changes in behavior
1611 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1615 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1616 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1620 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1621 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1622 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1624 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1625 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1627 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1628 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1630 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1632 ** Improved robustness
1634 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1635 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1636 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1638 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1639 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1642 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1643 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1645 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1646 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1648 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1649 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1651 ** Changes in behavior
1653 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1654 where the two are distinct.
1656 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1657 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1658 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1659 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1660 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1661 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1662 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1663 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1664 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1665 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1666 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1667 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1668 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1669 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1670 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1671 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1672 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1674 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1675 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1676 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1678 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1679 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1680 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1681 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1684 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1685 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1689 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1690 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1691 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1692 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1694 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1695 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1696 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1698 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1699 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1700 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1701 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1702 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1705 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1706 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1708 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1709 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1710 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1711 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1713 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1714 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1715 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1717 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1718 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1719 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1720 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1722 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1723 and sticky) with the -m option.
1725 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1726 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1727 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1728 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1729 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1731 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1732 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1734 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1738 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1739 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1740 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1741 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1743 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1745 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1747 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1748 silently ignoring one of them.
1750 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1751 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1752 containing this change was 5.92.
1754 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1755 automatically newline terminated.
1757 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1758 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1759 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1760 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1763 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1764 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1765 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1768 ** Scheduled for removal
1770 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1771 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1773 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1774 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1775 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1776 command to unlink a directory.
1778 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1779 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1780 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1781 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1785 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1786 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1787 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1788 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1789 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1790 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1794 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1795 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1797 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1799 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1800 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1801 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1803 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1804 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1807 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1808 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1810 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1811 list directories before files.
1813 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1814 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1815 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1816 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1819 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1821 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1823 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1824 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1825 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1827 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1828 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1832 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1833 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1834 usually printing nothing.
1836 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1838 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1839 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1840 them with hard-linked directories.
1842 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1843 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1844 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1846 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1847 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1848 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1850 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1853 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1854 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1856 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1857 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1859 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1860 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1862 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1863 all command-line arguments.
1865 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1867 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1869 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1870 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1872 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1874 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1875 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1876 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1877 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1878 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1880 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1881 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1883 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1884 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1885 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1886 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1888 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1890 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1894 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1895 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1897 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1898 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1900 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1901 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1903 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1904 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1906 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1907 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1909 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1911 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1912 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1913 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1916 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1918 ** Build-related bug fixes
1920 installing .mo files would fail
1923 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1927 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1929 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1932 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1936 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1937 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1941 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1943 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1944 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1946 ** Deprecated options
1948 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1949 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1951 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1955 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1957 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1958 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1959 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1960 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1962 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1965 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1971 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1976 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1978 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1980 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1981 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1982 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1984 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1985 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1986 problematic usages. These include:
1988 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1989 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1990 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1991 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1992 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1993 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1994 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1995 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1996 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1998 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1999 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2001 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2002 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2003 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2004 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2006 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2007 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2008 between binary and text files.
2010 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2014 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2018 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2019 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2021 head tac tail tee tr
2022 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2024 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2025 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2027 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2028 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2029 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2031 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2033 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2035 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2036 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2037 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2041 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2043 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2044 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2046 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2047 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2048 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2052 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2053 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2057 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2058 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2059 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2063 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2064 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2068 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2070 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2072 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2076 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2077 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2078 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2080 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2081 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2082 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2083 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2084 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2086 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2090 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2091 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2092 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2094 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2096 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2097 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2098 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2099 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2101 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2103 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2104 rather than silently wrapping around.
2106 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2107 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2109 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2110 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2112 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2113 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2114 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2115 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2117 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2119 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2121 ** Improved robustness
2123 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2124 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2125 no matter how large the result.
2127 ** Improved portability
2129 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2130 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2132 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2134 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2135 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2136 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2138 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2139 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2143 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2144 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2146 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2148 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2149 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2150 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2151 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2153 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2154 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2156 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2157 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2158 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2160 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2162 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2163 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2165 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2166 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2168 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2170 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2171 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2173 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2174 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2176 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2177 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2178 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2180 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2182 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2184 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2188 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2190 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2191 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2192 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2194 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2195 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2197 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2198 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2199 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2201 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2202 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2204 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2205 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2206 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2207 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2209 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2210 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2212 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2213 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2214 the file system does not support it.
2216 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2218 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2219 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2221 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2223 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2224 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2226 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2227 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2228 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2229 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2231 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2232 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2235 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2236 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2237 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2238 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2240 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2241 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2242 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2243 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2245 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2246 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2248 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2250 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2251 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2252 reporting incorrect results.
2256 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2257 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2259 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2262 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2264 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2265 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2267 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2268 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2270 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2273 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2274 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2275 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2276 the file name does not look like a page range.
2278 printf has several changes:
2280 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2281 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2283 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2284 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2285 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2287 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2288 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2291 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2292 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2294 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2295 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2297 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2299 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2300 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2302 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2304 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2306 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2307 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2308 when first encountering the directory.
2312 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2313 output; POSIX requires this.
2315 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2316 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2318 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2320 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2321 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2323 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2324 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2326 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2327 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2328 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2329 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2330 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2331 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2332 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2334 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2335 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2336 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2338 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2339 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2341 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2343 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2345 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2346 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2347 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2348 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2350 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2354 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2355 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2356 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2357 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2358 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2360 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2361 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2362 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2364 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2365 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2367 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2368 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2370 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2371 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2372 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2373 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2374 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2376 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2377 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2379 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2380 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2382 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2384 nocreat do not create the output file
2385 excl fail if the output file already exists
2386 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2387 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2389 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2391 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2392 direct use direct I/O for data
2393 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2394 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2395 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2396 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2397 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2399 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2401 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2402 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2405 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2406 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2407 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2408 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2409 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2410 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2412 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2413 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2415 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2418 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2420 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2422 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2423 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2425 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2426 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2427 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2429 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2430 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2431 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2433 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2435 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2436 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2438 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2439 for compatibility with bash.
2441 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2443 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2444 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2445 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2446 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2448 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2449 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2451 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2452 ls supports TABSIZE.
2453 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2454 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2455 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2457 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2460 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2462 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2463 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2464 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2465 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2466 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2467 an offset, not as a file name.
2469 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2470 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2472 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2473 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2475 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2476 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2478 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2479 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2480 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2482 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2483 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2485 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2486 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2490 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2492 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2494 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2498 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2499 or more arguments between partitions.
2501 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2502 holes in the destination.
2504 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2505 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2506 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2507 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2508 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2509 terminates immediately.
2511 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2513 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2515 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2516 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2517 not the empty string.
2519 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2520 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2524 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2525 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2526 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2529 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2536 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2540 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2541 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2543 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2544 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2546 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2547 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2548 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2551 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2555 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2556 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2558 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2559 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2561 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2562 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2563 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2565 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2567 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2570 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2572 ** Configuration option
2574 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2575 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2579 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2580 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2584 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2585 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2586 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2589 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2590 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2591 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2592 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2593 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2594 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2595 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2598 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2602 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2603 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2604 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2606 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2607 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2609 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2611 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2612 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2613 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2614 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2616 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2618 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2619 not just the ones that reference directories
2621 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2622 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2624 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2625 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2626 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2628 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2629 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2630 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2631 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2632 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2633 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2635 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2640 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2641 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2643 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2645 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2647 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2649 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2650 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2652 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2653 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2655 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2657 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2661 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2663 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2665 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2666 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2667 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2668 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2669 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2671 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2672 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2674 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2675 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2677 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2678 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2680 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2681 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2682 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2686 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2687 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2688 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2689 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2690 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2691 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2692 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2693 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2694 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2695 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2696 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2697 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2698 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2699 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2701 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2703 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2704 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2706 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2708 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2710 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2711 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2713 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2715 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2716 without a trailing newline.
2718 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2719 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2721 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2724 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2728 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2730 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2732 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2733 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2734 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2735 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2737 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2739 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2740 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2741 be printed without leading spaces.
2743 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2744 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2749 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2750 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2751 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2753 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2755 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2756 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2758 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2759 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2761 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2762 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2764 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2766 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2768 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2770 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2771 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2773 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2775 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2777 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2778 byte offsets are specified.
2781 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2784 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2787 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2788 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2789 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2790 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2791 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2792 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2793 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2794 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2795 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2796 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2797 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2798 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2799 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2800 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2801 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2802 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2803 directory where M has write access.
2804 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2805 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2806 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2809 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2810 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2811 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2812 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2813 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2814 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2815 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2816 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2817 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2818 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2819 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2820 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2821 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2822 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2823 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2824 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2825 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2826 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2827 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2828 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2829 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2830 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2831 appeared one additional time.
2833 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2834 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2835 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2836 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2839 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2840 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2841 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2842 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2843 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2844 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2845 if there were more than 338.
2847 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2848 - false --help now exits nonzero
2851 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2852 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2853 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2854 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2857 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2858 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2859 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2860 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2861 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2864 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2865 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2866 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2867 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2868 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2869 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2870 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2873 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2874 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2875 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2876 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2877 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2878 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2880 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2881 under certain unusual conditions
2882 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2883 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2886 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2887 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2888 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2889 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2890 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2891 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2892 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2893 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2894 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2895 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2896 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2897 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2898 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2899 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2900 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2901 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2904 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2905 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2908 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2909 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2910 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2911 involving hard-linked directories
2912 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2913 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2914 character-special and block files
2917 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2918 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2919 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2920 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2921 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2922 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2923 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2924 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2925 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2927 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2928 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2929 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2930 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2931 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2932 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2933 specified on the command line.
2934 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2935 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2936 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2937 the first file untouched.
2938 * readlink: new program
2939 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2940 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2941 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2942 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2943 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2944 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2947 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2948 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2949 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2950 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2951 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2952 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2953 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2954 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2955 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2956 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2957 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2958 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2960 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2961 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2962 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2964 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2965 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2966 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2967 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2968 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2969 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2970 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2971 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2974 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2975 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2978 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2979 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2980 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2981 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2982 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2983 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2984 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2987 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2988 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2990 ========================================================================
2991 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2992 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2995 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2997 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2998 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2999 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3000 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3001 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3002 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3003 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3004 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3005 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3006 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3007 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3008 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3010 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3011 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3012 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3013 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3015 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3018 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3020 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3021 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3022 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3023 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3024 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3025 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3026 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3029 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3030 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3031 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3032 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3033 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3034 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3035 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3036 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3037 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3038 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3039 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3040 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3041 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3042 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3043 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3044 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3046 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3047 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3049 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3050 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3051 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3052 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3053 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3054 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3056 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3057 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3058 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3059 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3060 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3061 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3062 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3064 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3065 the source files in the following example:
3066 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3067 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3068 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3069 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3070 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3071 links between source files with --preserve=links
3072 * cp accepts new options:
3073 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3074 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3075 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3076 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3077 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3078 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3079 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3080 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3081 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3083 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3084 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3085 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3086 even though it's older than dest.
3087 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3088 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3089 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3090 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3091 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3093 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3094 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3095 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3096 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3097 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3098 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3099 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3101 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3102 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3103 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3105 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3106 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3107 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3108 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3109 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3110 This is the default.
3112 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3113 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3114 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3115 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3116 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3118 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3121 ========================================================================
3122 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3123 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3126 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3127 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3129 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3130 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3131 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3132 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3133 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3135 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3136 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3137 that specifies a non-directory
3140 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3141 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3142 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3143 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3144 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3145 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3146 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3147 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3148 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3149 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3150 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3151 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3152 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3153 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3154 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3155 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3156 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3157 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3158 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3159 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3160 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3161 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3162 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3163 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3165 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3166 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3167 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3169 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3171 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3172 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3174 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3175 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3176 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3177 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3178 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3180 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3181 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3182 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3183 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3184 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3186 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3188 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3189 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3190 * still more portability fixes
3191 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3192 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3194 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3196 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3198 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3200 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3201 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3202 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3203 there is any time remaining
3204 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3206 ========================================================================
3207 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3208 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3210 This package began as the union of the following:
3211 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3213 ========================================================================
3215 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3217 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3218 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3219 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3220 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3221 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3222 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.