1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
7 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
8 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
9 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
12 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
16 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
17 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
19 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
20 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
22 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
23 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
25 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
26 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
27 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
28 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
30 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
31 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
33 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
34 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
35 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
37 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
39 ** Changes in behavior
41 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
42 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
43 to the number of available processors.
47 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
50 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
54 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
55 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
56 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
57 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
59 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
60 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
61 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
63 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
64 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
66 ** Changes in behavior
68 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
69 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
71 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
72 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
73 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
74 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
75 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
76 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
78 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
79 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
80 the same way as the others.
83 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
87 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
88 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
89 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
91 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
92 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
94 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
95 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
96 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
98 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
99 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
101 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
102 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
104 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
105 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
106 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
108 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
109 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
110 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
111 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
115 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
116 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
118 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
121 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
122 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
124 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
126 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
127 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
128 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
130 ** Changes in behavior
132 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
133 rather than its aliased target.
135 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
136 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
137 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
139 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
140 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
141 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
142 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
143 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
144 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
145 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
146 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
148 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
150 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
152 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
153 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
156 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
157 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
158 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
159 control like taskset for example.
161 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
163 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
164 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
165 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
166 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
167 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
168 includes %C when context information is available.
170 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
171 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
172 rather than a file system attribute.
174 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
175 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
176 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
177 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
179 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
180 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
181 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
183 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
184 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
185 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
188 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
192 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
193 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
195 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
197 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
198 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
200 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
201 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
202 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
203 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
205 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
206 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
207 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
211 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
212 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
214 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
215 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
216 duration after the initial signal was sent.
218 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
219 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
220 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
221 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
222 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
223 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
224 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
225 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
226 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
228 ** Changes in behavior
230 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
231 sequence when it would be a no-op.
233 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
234 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
237 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
241 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
242 of available processors, which may not have been the case
243 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
244 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
248 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
249 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
251 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
252 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
253 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
254 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
256 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
257 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
258 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
261 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
265 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
266 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
267 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
269 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
270 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
271 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
273 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
274 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
276 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
277 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
278 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
279 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
281 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
282 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
283 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
285 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
286 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
287 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
288 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
290 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
291 renamed-aside and then recreated.
292 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
294 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
295 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
296 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
297 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
299 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
300 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
301 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
303 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
304 processes will not intersperse their output.
305 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
308 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
312 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
313 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
315 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
316 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
318 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
319 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
320 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
321 the presence of the empty string argument.
322 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
324 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
325 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
326 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
327 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
329 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
330 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
332 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
333 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
334 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
336 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
337 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
338 and with a malicious user on the same system
339 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
340 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
343 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
347 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
348 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
349 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
351 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
352 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
353 offending directory and all "contents."
355 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
356 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
357 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
359 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
360 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
361 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
363 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
364 processes will not intersperse their output.
365 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
366 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
368 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
369 output the name of the file to stdout.
370 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
372 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
373 call fails with errno == EACCES.
374 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
376 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
377 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
380 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
381 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
382 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
384 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
385 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
386 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
387 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
388 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
389 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
391 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
392 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
393 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
394 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
396 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
397 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
399 ** Changes in behavior
401 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
402 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
403 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
404 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
405 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
407 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
408 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
409 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
410 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
412 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
414 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
415 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
416 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
417 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
418 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
422 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
426 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
427 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
429 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
430 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
432 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
433 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
434 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
436 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
437 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
440 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
444 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
445 when the source file doesn't have write access.
446 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
448 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
449 to accommodate leap seconds.
450 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
452 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
453 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
454 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
456 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
458 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
459 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
460 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
462 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
463 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
464 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
465 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
466 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
470 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
471 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
472 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
473 directory or a symlink to a directory.
475 ** Changes in behavior
477 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
478 environment variable is set.
480 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
481 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
482 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
486 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
487 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
488 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
489 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
491 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
492 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
493 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
494 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
498 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
499 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
500 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
502 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
503 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
504 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
505 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
506 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
507 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
510 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
511 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
514 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
518 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
519 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
520 and libraries tested at configure time.
521 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
523 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
524 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
526 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
527 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
529 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
530 printing a summary to stderr.
531 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
533 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
534 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
535 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
537 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
538 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
540 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
541 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
542 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
543 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
545 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
546 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
547 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
548 which is relatively unusual.
549 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
551 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
552 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
553 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
554 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
555 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
556 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
557 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
561 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
562 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
563 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
564 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
565 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
569 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
570 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
572 ** Changes in behavior
574 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
575 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
576 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
577 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
578 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
581 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
585 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
586 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
588 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
589 before data copying has started.
591 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
592 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
594 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
595 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
596 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
597 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
599 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
600 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
601 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
602 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
604 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
609 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
610 for its standard streams.
612 ** Changes in behavior
614 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
615 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
616 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
617 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
618 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
619 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
621 ** Deprecated options
623 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
624 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
628 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
630 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
631 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
634 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
636 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
637 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
639 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
640 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
643 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
647 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
648 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
649 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
650 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
652 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
653 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
654 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
655 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
656 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
661 make check: two tests have been corrected
665 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
666 inherited from gnulib.
669 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
673 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
674 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
675 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
676 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
678 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
679 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
681 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
683 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
684 systems without xattr support.
686 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
687 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
688 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
690 ** Changes in behavior
692 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
693 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
694 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
695 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
697 ** Improved robustness
699 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
700 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
701 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
702 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
703 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
704 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
705 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
706 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
707 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
711 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
712 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
714 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
715 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
716 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
717 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
718 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
721 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
725 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
726 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
727 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
731 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
732 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
733 data was read, or on process exit.
734 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
736 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
737 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
738 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
739 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
741 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
742 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
743 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
744 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
746 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
747 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
749 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
750 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
752 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
753 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
754 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
756 ** Changes in behavior
758 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
759 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
760 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
762 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
763 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
765 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
766 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
767 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
770 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
774 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
776 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
777 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
778 install: Never copies xattrs
780 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
781 from overwriting any existing destination file
783 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
784 mode where this feature is available.
786 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
787 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
788 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
789 do not modify the destination at all.
791 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
793 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
797 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
798 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
800 cp uses much less memory in some situations
802 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
803 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
805 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
806 processing the first file name
808 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
809 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
810 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
811 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
813 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
814 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
816 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
817 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
820 ** Changes in behavior
822 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
823 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
825 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
826 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
827 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
829 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
830 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
832 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
834 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
835 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
836 is still marked with a '+'.
839 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
843 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
844 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
848 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
849 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
850 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
851 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
852 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
853 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
855 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
856 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
858 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
859 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
861 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
863 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
864 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
865 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
867 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
868 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
870 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
871 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
872 used to factor large numbers.
874 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
877 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
879 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
881 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
882 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
884 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
885 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
886 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
887 maximum command-line (argv) length.
889 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
890 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
891 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
893 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
894 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
898 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
900 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
901 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
903 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
904 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
906 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
908 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
909 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
913 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
914 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
915 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
917 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
919 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
920 no matter how many files are in a given directory
922 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
923 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
924 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
926 ** Changes in behavior
928 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
929 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
932 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
936 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
938 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
939 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
940 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
942 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
943 with no USERNAME argument.
945 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
946 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
947 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
949 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
950 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
951 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
952 number of fields for some inputs.
954 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
955 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
957 ** Changes in behavior
959 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
960 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
963 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
967 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
969 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
970 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
971 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
972 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
974 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
975 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
977 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
978 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
980 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
981 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
983 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
984 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
985 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
986 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
988 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
989 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
990 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
991 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
992 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
993 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
995 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
996 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
998 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
999 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1000 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1002 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1003 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1005 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1006 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1008 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1009 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1010 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1011 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1013 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1014 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1016 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1017 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1019 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1020 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1021 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1025 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1026 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1028 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1029 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1030 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1031 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1035 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1036 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1038 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1040 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1044 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1045 which have negative errno values.
1049 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1053 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1057 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1058 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1061 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1065 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1066 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1067 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1069 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1070 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1071 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1072 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1076 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1077 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1078 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1079 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1082 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1086 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1088 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1089 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1090 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1093 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1097 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1098 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1100 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1102 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1104 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1106 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1110 ** Changes in behavior
1112 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1113 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1115 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1116 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1118 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1119 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1120 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1124 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1125 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1126 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1127 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1128 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1129 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1130 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1131 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1132 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1133 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1134 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1136 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1137 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1138 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1141 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1144 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1145 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1146 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1148 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1149 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1150 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1153 ** New build options
1155 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1156 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1157 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1158 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1160 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1161 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1162 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1163 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1164 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1165 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1166 of "make check" fail.
1168 ** Remove deprecated options
1170 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1171 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1172 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1173 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1174 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1176 ** Improved robustness
1178 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1179 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1180 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1181 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1182 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1183 loss of the contents of a/f.
1185 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1186 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1190 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1191 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1192 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1194 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1195 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1196 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1197 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1199 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1200 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1201 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1202 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1203 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1204 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1205 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1206 destination is a symlink.
1208 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1210 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1211 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1213 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1214 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1216 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1218 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1219 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1221 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1222 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1224 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1227 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1228 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1230 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1231 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1233 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1234 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1235 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1236 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1238 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1239 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1240 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1242 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1243 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1244 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1246 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1247 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1248 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1249 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1251 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1252 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1253 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1255 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1256 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1258 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1259 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1261 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1263 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1264 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1265 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1267 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1268 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1270 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1271 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1273 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1274 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1276 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1277 [present in the original version]
1280 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1284 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1286 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1287 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1288 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1290 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1291 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1293 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1297 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1298 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1300 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1301 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1303 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1304 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1306 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1307 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1308 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1309 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1310 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1311 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1313 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1314 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1317 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1318 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1320 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1323 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1324 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1325 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1327 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1328 directory is unreadable.
1330 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1331 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1332 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1334 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1335 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1336 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1337 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1338 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1341 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1342 Before it would print nothing.
1344 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1346 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1347 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1348 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1349 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1350 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1351 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1352 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1353 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1355 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1359 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1360 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1361 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1363 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1364 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1365 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1366 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1369 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1373 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1374 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1375 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1376 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1377 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1378 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1379 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1381 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1382 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1383 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1384 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1385 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1386 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1387 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1388 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1390 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1391 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1392 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1395 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1399 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1400 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1402 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1403 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1404 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1406 ** Improved robustness
1408 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1409 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1410 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1413 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1417 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1418 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1419 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1420 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1421 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1423 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1427 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1430 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1434 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1435 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1436 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1437 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1439 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1440 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1442 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1443 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1444 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1447 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1449 ** Improved robustness
1451 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1452 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1454 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1455 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1456 or NFS-mounted partition.
1458 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1459 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1463 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1464 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1465 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1466 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1467 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1468 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1470 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1471 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1473 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1474 or neglect to report file removal.
1476 For the "groups" command:
1478 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1479 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1481 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1483 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1485 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1489 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1490 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1493 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1495 ** Changes in behavior
1497 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1498 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1499 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1500 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1502 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1503 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1504 a final `./' or `../' component.
1506 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1507 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1508 this only for pipes.
1510 ** Infrastructure changes
1512 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1513 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1514 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1515 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1519 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1520 name is "." or "..".
1522 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1523 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1524 dirent.d_type support.
1526 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1527 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1529 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1530 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1531 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1532 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1535 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1537 ** Changes in behavior
1539 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1543 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1544 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1548 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1549 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1550 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1552 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1553 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1555 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1556 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1558 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1560 ** Improved robustness
1562 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1563 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1564 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1566 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1567 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1570 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1571 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1573 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1574 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1576 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1577 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1579 ** Changes in behavior
1581 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1582 where the two are distinct.
1584 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1585 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1586 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1587 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1588 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1589 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1590 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1591 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1592 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1593 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1594 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1595 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1596 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1597 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1598 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1599 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1600 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1602 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1603 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1604 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1606 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1607 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1608 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1609 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1612 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1613 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1617 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1618 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1619 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1620 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1622 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1623 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1624 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1626 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1627 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1628 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1629 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1630 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1633 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1634 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1636 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1637 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1638 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1639 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1641 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1642 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1643 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1645 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1646 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1647 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1648 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1650 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1651 and sticky) with the -m option.
1653 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1654 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1655 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1656 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1657 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1659 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1660 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1662 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1666 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1667 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1668 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1669 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1671 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1673 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1675 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1676 silently ignoring one of them.
1678 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1679 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1680 containing this change was 5.92.
1682 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1683 automatically newline terminated.
1685 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1686 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1687 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1688 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1691 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1692 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1693 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1696 ** Scheduled for removal
1698 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1699 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1701 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1702 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1703 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1704 command to unlink a directory.
1706 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1707 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1708 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1709 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1713 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1714 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1715 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1716 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1717 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1718 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1722 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1723 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1725 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1727 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1728 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1729 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1731 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1732 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1735 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1736 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1738 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1739 list directories before files.
1741 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1742 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1743 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1744 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1747 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1749 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1751 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1752 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1753 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1755 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1756 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1760 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1761 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1762 usually printing nothing.
1764 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1766 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1767 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1768 them with hard-linked directories.
1770 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1771 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1772 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1774 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1775 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1776 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1778 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1781 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1782 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1784 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1785 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1787 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1788 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1790 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1791 all command-line arguments.
1793 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1795 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1797 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1798 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1800 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1802 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1803 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1804 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1805 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1806 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1808 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1809 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1811 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1812 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1813 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1814 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1816 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1818 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1822 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1823 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1825 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1826 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1828 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1829 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1831 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1832 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1834 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1835 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1837 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1839 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1840 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1841 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1844 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1846 ** Build-related bug fixes
1848 installing .mo files would fail
1851 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1855 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1857 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1860 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1864 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1865 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1869 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1871 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1872 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1874 ** Deprecated options
1876 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1877 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1879 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1883 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1885 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1886 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1887 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1888 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1890 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1893 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1899 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1904 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1906 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1908 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1909 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1910 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1912 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1913 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1914 problematic usages. These include:
1916 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1917 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1918 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1919 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1920 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1921 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1922 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1923 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1924 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1926 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1927 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1929 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1930 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1931 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1932 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1934 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1935 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1936 between binary and text files.
1938 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1942 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1946 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1947 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1949 head tac tail tee tr
1950 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1952 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1953 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1955 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1956 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1957 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1959 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1961 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1963 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1964 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1965 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1969 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1971 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1972 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1974 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1975 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1976 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1980 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1981 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1985 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1986 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1987 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1991 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1992 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1996 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1998 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2000 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2004 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2005 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2006 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2008 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2009 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2010 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2011 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2012 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2014 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2018 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2019 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2020 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2022 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2024 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2025 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2026 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2027 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2029 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2031 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2032 rather than silently wrapping around.
2034 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2035 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2037 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2038 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2040 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2041 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2042 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2043 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2045 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2047 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2049 ** Improved robustness
2051 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2052 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2053 no matter how large the result.
2055 ** Improved portability
2057 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2058 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2060 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2062 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2063 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2064 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2066 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2067 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2071 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2072 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2074 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2076 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2077 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2078 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2079 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2081 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2082 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2084 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2085 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2086 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2088 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2090 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2091 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2093 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2094 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2096 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2098 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2099 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2101 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2102 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2104 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2105 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2106 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2108 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2110 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2112 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2116 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2118 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2119 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2120 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2122 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2123 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2125 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2126 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2127 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2129 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2130 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2132 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2133 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2134 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2135 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2137 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2138 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2140 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2141 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2142 the file system does not support it.
2144 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2146 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2147 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2149 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2151 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2152 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2154 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2155 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2156 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2157 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2159 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2160 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2163 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2164 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2165 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2166 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2168 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2169 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2170 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2171 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2173 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2174 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2176 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2178 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2179 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2180 reporting incorrect results.
2184 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2185 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2187 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2190 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2192 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2193 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2195 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2196 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2198 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2201 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2202 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2203 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2204 the file name does not look like a page range.
2206 printf has several changes:
2208 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2209 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2211 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2212 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2213 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2215 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2216 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2219 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2220 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2222 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2223 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2225 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2227 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2228 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2230 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2232 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2234 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2235 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2236 when first encountering the directory.
2240 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2241 output; POSIX requires this.
2243 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2244 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2246 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2248 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2249 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2251 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2252 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2254 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2255 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2256 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2257 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2258 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2259 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2260 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2262 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2263 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2264 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2266 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2267 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2269 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2271 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2273 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2274 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2275 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2276 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2278 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2282 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2283 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2284 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2285 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2286 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2288 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2289 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2290 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2292 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2293 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2295 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2296 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2298 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2299 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2300 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2301 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2302 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2304 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2305 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2307 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2308 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2310 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2312 nocreat do not create the output file
2313 excl fail if the output file already exists
2314 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2315 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2317 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2319 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2320 direct use direct I/O for data
2321 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2322 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2323 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2324 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2325 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2327 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2329 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2330 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2333 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2334 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2335 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2336 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2337 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2338 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2340 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2341 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2343 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2346 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2348 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2350 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2351 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2353 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2354 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2355 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2357 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2358 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2359 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2361 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2363 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2364 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2366 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2367 for compatibility with bash.
2369 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2371 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2372 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2373 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2374 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2376 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2377 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2379 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2380 ls supports TABSIZE.
2381 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2382 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2383 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2385 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2388 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2390 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2391 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2392 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2393 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2394 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2395 an offset, not as a file name.
2397 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2398 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2400 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2401 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2403 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2404 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2406 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2407 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2408 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2410 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2411 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2413 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2414 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2418 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2420 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2422 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2426 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2427 or more arguments between partitions.
2429 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2430 holes in the destination.
2432 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2433 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2434 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2435 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2436 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2437 terminates immediately.
2439 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2441 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2443 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2444 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2445 not the empty string.
2447 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2448 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2452 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2453 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2454 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2457 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2464 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2468 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2469 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2471 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2472 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2474 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2475 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2476 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2479 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2483 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2484 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2486 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2487 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2489 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2490 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2491 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2493 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2495 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2498 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2500 ** Configuration option
2502 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2503 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2507 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2508 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2512 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2513 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2514 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2517 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2518 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2519 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2520 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2521 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2522 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2523 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2526 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2530 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2531 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2532 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2534 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2535 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2537 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2539 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2540 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2541 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2542 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2544 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2546 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2547 not just the ones that reference directories
2549 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2550 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2552 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2553 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2554 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2556 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2557 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2558 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2559 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2560 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2561 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2563 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2568 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2569 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2571 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2573 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2575 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2577 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2578 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2580 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2581 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2583 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2585 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2589 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2591 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2593 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2594 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2595 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2596 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2597 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2599 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2600 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2602 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2603 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2605 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2606 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2608 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2609 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2610 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2614 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2615 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2616 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2617 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2618 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2619 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2620 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2621 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2622 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2623 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2624 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2625 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2626 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2627 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2629 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2631 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2632 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2634 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2636 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2638 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2639 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2641 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2643 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2644 without a trailing newline.
2646 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2647 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2649 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2652 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2656 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2658 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2660 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2661 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2662 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2663 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2665 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2667 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2668 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2669 be printed without leading spaces.
2671 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2672 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2677 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2678 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2679 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2681 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2683 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2684 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2686 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2687 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2689 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2690 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2692 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2694 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2696 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2698 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2699 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2701 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2703 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2705 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2706 byte offsets are specified.
2709 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2712 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2715 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2716 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2717 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2718 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2719 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2720 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2721 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2722 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2723 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2724 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2725 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2726 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2727 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2728 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2729 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2730 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2731 directory where M has write access.
2732 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2733 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2734 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2737 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2738 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2739 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2740 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2741 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2742 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2743 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2744 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2745 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2746 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2747 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2748 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2749 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2750 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2751 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2752 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2753 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2754 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2755 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2756 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2757 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2758 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2759 appeared one additional time.
2761 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2762 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2763 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2764 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2767 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2768 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2769 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2770 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2771 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2772 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2773 if there were more than 338.
2775 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2776 - false --help now exits nonzero
2779 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2780 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2781 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2782 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2785 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2786 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2787 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2788 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2789 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2792 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2793 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2794 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2795 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2796 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2797 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2798 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2801 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2802 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2803 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2804 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2805 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2806 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2808 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2809 under certain unusual conditions
2810 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2811 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2814 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2815 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2816 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2817 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2818 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2819 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2820 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2821 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2822 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2823 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2824 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2825 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2826 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2827 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2828 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2829 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2832 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2833 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2836 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2837 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2838 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2839 involving hard-linked directories
2840 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2841 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2842 character-special and block files
2845 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2846 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2847 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2848 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2849 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2850 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2851 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2852 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2853 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2855 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2856 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2857 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2858 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2859 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2860 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2861 specified on the command line.
2862 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2863 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2864 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2865 the first file untouched.
2866 * readlink: new program
2867 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2868 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2869 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2870 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2871 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2872 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2875 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2876 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2877 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2878 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2879 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2880 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2881 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2882 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2883 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2884 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2885 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2886 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2888 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2889 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2890 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2892 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2893 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2894 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2895 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2896 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2897 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2898 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2899 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2902 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2903 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2906 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2907 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2908 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2909 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2910 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2911 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2912 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2915 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2916 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2918 ========================================================================
2919 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2920 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2923 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2925 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2926 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2927 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2928 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2929 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2930 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2931 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2932 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2933 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2934 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2935 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2936 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2938 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2939 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2940 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2941 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2943 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2946 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2948 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2949 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2950 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2951 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2952 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2953 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2954 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2957 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2958 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2959 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2960 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2961 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2962 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2963 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2964 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2965 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2966 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2967 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2968 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2969 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2970 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2971 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2972 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2974 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2975 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2977 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2978 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2979 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2980 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2981 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2982 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2984 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2985 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2986 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2987 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2988 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2989 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2990 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2992 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2993 the source files in the following example:
2994 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2995 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2996 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2997 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2998 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2999 links between source files with --preserve=links
3000 * cp accepts new options:
3001 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3002 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3003 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3004 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3005 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3006 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3007 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3008 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3009 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3011 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3012 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3013 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3014 even though it's older than dest.
3015 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3016 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3017 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3018 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3019 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3021 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3022 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3023 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3024 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3025 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3026 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3027 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3029 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3030 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3031 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3033 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3034 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3035 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3036 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3037 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3038 This is the default.
3040 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3041 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3042 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3043 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3044 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3046 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3049 ========================================================================
3050 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3051 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3054 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3055 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3057 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3058 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3059 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3060 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3061 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3063 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3064 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3065 that specifies a non-directory
3068 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3069 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3070 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3071 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3072 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3073 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3074 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3075 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3076 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3077 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3078 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3079 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3080 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3081 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3082 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3083 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3084 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3085 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3086 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3087 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3088 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3089 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3090 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3091 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3093 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3094 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3095 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3097 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3099 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3100 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3102 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3103 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3104 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3105 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3106 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3108 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3109 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3110 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3111 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3112 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3114 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3116 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3117 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3118 * still more portability fixes
3119 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3120 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3122 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3124 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3126 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3128 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3129 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3130 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3131 there is any time remaining
3132 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3134 ========================================================================
3135 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3136 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3138 This package began as the union of the following:
3139 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3141 ========================================================================
3143 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3145 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3146 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3147 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3148 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3149 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3150 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.