1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
8 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
9 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
11 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
12 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
14 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
15 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
16 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
18 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
19 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
21 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
22 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
23 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
24 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
28 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
29 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
31 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
34 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
35 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
37 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
39 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
40 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
41 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
43 ** Changes in behavior
45 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
46 rather than its aliased target.
48 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
49 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
50 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
52 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
53 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
54 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
55 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
56 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
57 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
58 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
59 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
61 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
63 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
65 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
66 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
69 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
70 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
71 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
72 control like taskset for example.
74 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
76 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
77 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
78 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
79 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
80 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
81 includes %C when context information is available.
83 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
84 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
85 rather than a file system attribute.
87 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
88 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
89 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
90 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
92 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
93 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
94 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
96 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
97 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
98 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
101 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
105 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
106 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
108 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
110 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
111 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
113 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
114 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
115 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
116 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
118 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
119 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
120 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
124 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
125 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
127 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
128 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
129 duration after the initial signal was sent.
131 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
132 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
133 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
134 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
135 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
136 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
137 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
138 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
139 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
141 ** Changes in behavior
143 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
144 sequence when it would be a no-op.
146 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
147 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
150 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
154 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
155 of available processors, which may not have been the case
156 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
157 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
161 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
162 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
164 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
165 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
166 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
167 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
169 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
170 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
171 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
174 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
178 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
179 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
180 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
182 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
183 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
184 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
186 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
187 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
189 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
190 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
191 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
192 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
194 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
195 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
196 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
198 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
199 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
200 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
201 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
203 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
204 renamed-aside and then recreated.
205 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
207 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
208 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
209 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
210 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
212 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
213 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
214 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
216 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
217 processes will not intersperse their output.
218 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
221 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
225 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
226 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
228 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
229 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
231 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
232 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
233 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
234 the presence of the empty string argument.
235 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
237 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
238 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
239 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
240 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
242 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
243 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
245 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
246 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
247 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
249 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
250 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
251 and with a malicious user on the same system
252 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
253 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
256 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
260 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
261 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
262 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
264 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
265 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
266 offending directory and all "contents."
268 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
269 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
270 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
272 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
273 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
274 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
276 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
277 processes will not intersperse their output.
278 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
279 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
281 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
282 output the name of the file to stdout.
283 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
285 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
286 call fails with errno == EACCES.
287 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
289 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
290 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
293 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
294 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
295 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
297 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
298 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
299 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
300 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
301 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
302 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
304 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
305 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
306 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
307 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
309 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
310 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
312 ** Changes in behavior
314 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
315 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
316 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
317 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
318 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
320 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
321 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
322 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
323 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
325 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
327 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
328 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
329 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
330 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
331 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
335 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
339 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
340 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
342 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
343 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
345 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
346 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
347 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
349 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
350 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
353 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
357 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
358 when the source file doesn't have write access.
359 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
361 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
362 to accommodate leap seconds.
363 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
365 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
366 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
367 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
369 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
371 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
372 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
373 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
375 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
376 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
377 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
378 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
379 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
383 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
384 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
385 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
386 directory or a symlink to a directory.
388 ** Changes in behavior
390 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
391 environment variable is set.
393 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
394 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
395 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
399 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
400 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
401 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
402 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
404 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
405 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
406 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
407 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
411 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
412 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
413 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
415 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
416 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
417 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
418 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
419 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
420 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
423 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
424 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
427 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
431 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
432 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
433 and libraries tested at configure time.
434 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
436 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
437 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
439 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
440 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
442 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
443 printing a summary to stderr.
444 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
446 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
447 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
448 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
450 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
451 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
453 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
454 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
455 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
456 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
458 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
459 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
460 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
461 which is relatively unusual.
462 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
464 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
465 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
466 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
467 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
468 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
469 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
470 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
474 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
475 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
476 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
477 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
478 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
482 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
483 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
485 ** Changes in behavior
487 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
488 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
489 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
490 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
491 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
494 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
498 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
499 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
501 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
502 before data copying has started.
504 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
505 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
507 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
508 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
509 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
510 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
512 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
513 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
514 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
515 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
517 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
522 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
523 for its standard streams.
525 ** Changes in behavior
527 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
528 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
529 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
530 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
531 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
532 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
534 ** Deprecated options
536 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
537 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
541 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
543 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
544 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
547 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
549 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
550 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
552 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
553 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
556 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
560 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
561 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
562 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
563 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
565 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
566 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
567 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
568 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
569 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
574 make check: two tests have been corrected
578 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
579 inherited from gnulib.
582 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
586 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
587 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
588 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
589 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
591 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
592 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
594 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
596 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
597 systems without xattr support.
599 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
600 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
601 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
603 ** Changes in behavior
605 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
606 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
607 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
608 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
610 ** Improved robustness
612 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
613 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
614 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
615 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
616 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
617 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
618 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
619 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
620 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
624 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
625 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
627 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
628 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
629 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
630 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
631 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
634 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
638 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
639 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
640 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
644 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
645 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
646 data was read, or on process exit.
647 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
649 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
650 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
651 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
652 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
654 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
655 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
656 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
657 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
659 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
660 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
662 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
663 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
665 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
666 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
667 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
669 ** Changes in behavior
671 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
672 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
673 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
675 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
676 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
678 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
679 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
680 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
683 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
687 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
689 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
690 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
691 install: Never copies xattrs
693 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
694 from overwriting any existing destination file
696 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
697 mode where this feature is available.
699 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
700 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
701 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
702 do not modify the destination at all.
704 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
706 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
710 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
711 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
713 cp uses much less memory in some situations
715 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
716 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
718 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
719 processing the first file name
721 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
722 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
723 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
724 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
726 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
727 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
729 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
730 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
733 ** Changes in behavior
735 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
736 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
738 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
739 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
740 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
742 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
743 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
745 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
747 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
748 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
749 is still marked with a '+'.
752 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
756 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
757 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
761 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
762 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
763 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
764 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
765 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
766 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
768 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
769 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
771 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
772 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
774 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
776 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
777 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
778 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
780 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
781 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
783 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
784 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
785 used to factor large numbers.
787 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
790 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
792 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
794 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
795 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
797 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
798 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
799 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
800 maximum command-line (argv) length.
802 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
803 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
804 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
806 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
807 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
811 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
813 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
814 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
816 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
817 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
819 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
821 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
822 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
826 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
827 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
828 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
830 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
832 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
833 no matter how many files are in a given directory
835 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
836 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
837 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
839 ** Changes in behavior
841 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
842 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
845 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
849 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
851 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
852 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
853 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
855 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
856 with no USERNAME argument.
858 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
859 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
860 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
862 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
863 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
864 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
865 number of fields for some inputs.
867 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
868 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
870 ** Changes in behavior
872 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
873 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
876 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
880 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
882 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
883 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
884 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
885 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
887 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
888 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
890 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
891 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
893 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
894 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
896 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
897 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
898 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
899 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
901 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
902 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
903 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
904 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
905 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
906 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
908 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
909 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
911 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
912 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
913 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
915 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
916 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
918 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
919 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
921 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
922 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
923 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
924 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
926 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
927 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
929 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
930 in more cases when a directory is empty.
932 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
933 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
934 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
938 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
939 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
941 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
942 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
943 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
944 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
948 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
949 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
951 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
953 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
957 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
958 which have negative errno values.
962 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
966 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
970 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
971 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
974 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
978 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
979 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
980 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
982 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
983 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
984 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
985 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
989 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
990 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
991 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
992 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
995 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
999 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1001 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1002 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1003 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1006 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1010 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1011 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1013 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1015 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1017 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1019 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1023 ** Changes in behavior
1025 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1026 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1028 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1029 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1031 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1032 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1033 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1037 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1038 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1039 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1040 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1041 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1042 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1043 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1044 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1045 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1046 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1047 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1049 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1050 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1051 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1054 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1057 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1058 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1059 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1061 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1062 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1063 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1066 ** New build options
1068 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1069 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1070 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1071 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1073 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1074 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1075 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1076 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1077 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1078 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1079 of "make check" fail.
1081 ** Remove deprecated options
1083 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1084 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1085 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1086 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1087 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1089 ** Improved robustness
1091 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1092 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1093 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1094 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1095 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1096 loss of the contents of a/f.
1098 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1099 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1103 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1104 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1105 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1107 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1108 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1109 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1110 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1112 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1113 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1114 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1115 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1116 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1117 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1118 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1119 destination is a symlink.
1121 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1123 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1124 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1126 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1127 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1129 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1131 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1132 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1134 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1135 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1137 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1140 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1141 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1143 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1144 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1146 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1147 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1148 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1149 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1151 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1152 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1153 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1155 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1156 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1157 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1159 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1160 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1161 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1162 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1164 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1165 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1166 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1168 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1169 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1171 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1172 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1174 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1176 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1177 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1178 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1180 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1181 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1183 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1184 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1186 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1187 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1189 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1190 [present in the original version]
1193 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1197 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1199 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1200 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1201 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1203 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1204 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1206 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1210 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1211 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1213 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1214 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1216 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1217 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1219 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1220 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1221 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1222 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1223 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1224 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1226 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1227 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1230 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1231 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1233 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1236 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1237 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1238 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1240 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1241 directory is unreadable.
1243 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1244 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1245 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1247 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1248 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1249 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1250 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1251 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1254 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1255 Before it would print nothing.
1257 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1259 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1260 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1261 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1262 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1263 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1264 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1265 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1266 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1268 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1272 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1273 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1274 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1276 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1277 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1278 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1279 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1282 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1286 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1287 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1288 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1289 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1290 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1291 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1292 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1294 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1295 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1296 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1297 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1298 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1299 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1300 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1301 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1303 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1304 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1305 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1308 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1312 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1313 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1315 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1316 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1317 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1319 ** Improved robustness
1321 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1322 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1323 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1326 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1330 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1331 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1332 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1333 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1334 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1336 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1340 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1343 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1347 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1348 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1349 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1350 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1352 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1353 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1355 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1356 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1357 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1360 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1362 ** Improved robustness
1364 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1365 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1367 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1368 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1369 or NFS-mounted partition.
1371 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1372 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1376 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1377 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1378 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1379 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1380 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1381 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1383 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1384 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1386 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1387 or neglect to report file removal.
1389 For the "groups" command:
1391 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1392 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1394 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1396 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1398 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1402 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1403 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1406 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1408 ** Changes in behavior
1410 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1411 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1412 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1413 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1415 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1416 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1417 a final `./' or `../' component.
1419 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1420 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1421 this only for pipes.
1423 ** Infrastructure changes
1425 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1426 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1427 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1428 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1432 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1433 name is "." or "..".
1435 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1436 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1437 dirent.d_type support.
1439 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1440 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1442 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1443 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1444 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1445 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1448 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1450 ** Changes in behavior
1452 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1456 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1457 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1461 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1462 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1463 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1465 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1466 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1468 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1469 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1471 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1473 ** Improved robustness
1475 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1476 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1477 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1479 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1480 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1483 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1484 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1486 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1487 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1489 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1490 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1492 ** Changes in behavior
1494 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1495 where the two are distinct.
1497 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1498 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1499 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1500 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1501 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1502 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1503 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1504 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1505 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1506 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1507 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1508 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1509 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1510 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1511 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1512 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1513 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1515 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1516 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1517 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1519 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1520 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1521 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1522 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1525 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1526 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1530 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1531 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1532 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1533 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1535 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1536 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1537 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1539 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1540 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1541 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1542 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1543 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1546 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1547 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1549 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1550 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1551 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1552 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1554 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1555 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1556 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1558 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1559 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1560 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1561 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1563 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1564 and sticky) with the -m option.
1566 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1567 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1568 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1569 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1570 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1572 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1573 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1575 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1579 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1580 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1581 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1582 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1584 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1586 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1588 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1589 silently ignoring one of them.
1591 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1592 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1593 containing this change was 5.92.
1595 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1596 automatically newline terminated.
1598 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1599 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1600 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1601 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1604 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1605 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1606 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1609 ** Scheduled for removal
1611 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1612 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1614 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1615 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1616 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1617 command to unlink a directory.
1619 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1620 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1621 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1622 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1626 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1627 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1628 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1629 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1630 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1631 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1635 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1636 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1638 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1640 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1641 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1642 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1644 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1645 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1648 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1649 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1651 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1652 list directories before files.
1654 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1655 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1656 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1657 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1660 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1662 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1664 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1665 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1666 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1668 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1669 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1673 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1674 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1675 usually printing nothing.
1677 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1679 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1680 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1681 them with hard-linked directories.
1683 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1684 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1685 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1687 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1688 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1689 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1691 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1694 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1695 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1697 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1698 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1700 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1701 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1703 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1704 all command-line arguments.
1706 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1708 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1710 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1711 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1713 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1715 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1716 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1717 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1718 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1719 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1721 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1722 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1724 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1725 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1726 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1727 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1729 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1731 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1735 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1736 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1738 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1739 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1741 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1742 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1744 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1745 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1747 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1748 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1750 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1752 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1753 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1754 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1757 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1759 ** Build-related bug fixes
1761 installing .mo files would fail
1764 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1768 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1770 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1773 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1777 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1778 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1782 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1784 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1785 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1787 ** Deprecated options
1789 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1790 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1792 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1796 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1798 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1799 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1800 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1801 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1803 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1806 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1812 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1817 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1819 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1821 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1822 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1823 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1825 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1826 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1827 problematic usages. These include:
1829 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1830 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1831 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1832 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1833 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1834 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1835 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1836 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1837 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1839 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1840 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1842 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1843 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1844 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1845 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1847 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1848 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1849 between binary and text files.
1851 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1855 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1859 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1860 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1862 head tac tail tee tr
1863 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1865 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1866 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1868 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1869 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1870 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1872 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1874 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1876 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1877 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1878 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1882 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1884 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1885 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1887 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1888 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1889 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1893 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1894 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1898 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1899 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1900 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1904 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1905 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1909 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1911 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1913 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1917 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1918 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1919 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1921 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1922 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1923 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1924 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1925 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1927 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
1931 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
1932 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
1933 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
1935 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
1937 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
1938 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
1939 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
1940 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
1942 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
1944 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
1945 rather than silently wrapping around.
1947 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
1948 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
1950 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
1951 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
1953 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
1954 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
1955 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
1956 file /tmp/a/b/file".
1958 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
1960 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
1962 ** Improved robustness
1964 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
1965 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
1966 no matter how large the result.
1968 ** Improved portability
1970 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
1971 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
1973 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
1975 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
1976 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
1977 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
1979 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
1980 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
1984 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
1985 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
1987 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
1989 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
1990 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
1991 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
1992 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
1994 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
1995 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
1997 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
1998 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
1999 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2001 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2003 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2004 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2006 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2007 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2009 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2011 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2012 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2014 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2015 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2017 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2018 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2019 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2021 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2023 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2025 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2029 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2031 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2032 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2033 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2035 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2036 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2038 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2039 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2040 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2042 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2043 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2045 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2046 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2047 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2048 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2050 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2051 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2053 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2054 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2055 the file system does not support it.
2057 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2059 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2060 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2062 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2064 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2065 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2067 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2068 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2069 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2070 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2072 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2073 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2076 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2077 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2078 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2079 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2081 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2082 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2083 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2084 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2086 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2087 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2089 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2091 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2092 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2093 reporting incorrect results.
2097 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2098 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2100 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2103 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2105 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2106 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2108 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2109 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2111 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2114 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2115 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2116 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2117 the file name does not look like a page range.
2119 printf has several changes:
2121 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2122 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2124 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2125 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2126 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2128 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2129 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2132 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2133 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2135 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2136 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2138 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2140 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2141 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2143 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2145 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2147 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2148 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2149 when first encountering the directory.
2153 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2154 output; POSIX requires this.
2156 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2157 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2159 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2161 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2162 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2164 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2165 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2167 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2168 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2169 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2170 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2171 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2172 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2173 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2175 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2176 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2177 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2179 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2180 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2182 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2184 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2186 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2187 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2188 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2189 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2191 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2195 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2196 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2197 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2198 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2199 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2201 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2202 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2203 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2205 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2206 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2208 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2209 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2211 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2212 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2213 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2214 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2215 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2217 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2218 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2220 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2221 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2223 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2225 nocreat do not create the output file
2226 excl fail if the output file already exists
2227 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2228 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2230 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2232 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2233 direct use direct I/O for data
2234 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2235 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2236 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2237 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2238 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2240 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2242 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2243 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2246 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2247 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2248 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2249 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2250 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2251 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2253 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2254 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2256 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2259 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2261 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2263 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2264 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2266 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2267 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2268 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2270 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2271 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2272 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2274 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2276 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2277 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2279 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2280 for compatibility with bash.
2282 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2284 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2285 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2286 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2287 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2289 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2290 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2292 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2293 ls supports TABSIZE.
2294 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2295 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2296 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2298 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2301 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2303 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2304 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2305 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2306 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2307 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2308 an offset, not as a file name.
2310 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2311 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2313 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2314 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2316 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2317 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2319 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2320 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2321 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2323 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2324 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2326 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2327 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2331 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2333 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2335 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2339 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2340 or more arguments between partitions.
2342 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2343 holes in the destination.
2345 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2346 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2347 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2348 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2349 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2350 terminates immediately.
2352 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2354 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2356 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2357 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2358 not the empty string.
2360 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2361 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2365 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2366 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2367 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2370 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2377 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2381 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2382 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2384 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2385 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2387 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2388 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2389 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2392 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2396 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2397 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2399 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2400 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2402 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2403 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2404 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2406 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2408 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2411 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2413 ** Configuration option
2415 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2416 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2420 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2421 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2425 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2426 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2427 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2430 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2431 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2432 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2433 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2434 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2435 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2436 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2439 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2443 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2444 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2445 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2447 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2448 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2450 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2452 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2453 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2454 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2455 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2457 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2459 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2460 not just the ones that reference directories
2462 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2463 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2465 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2466 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2467 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2469 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2470 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2471 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2472 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2473 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2474 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2476 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2481 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2482 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2484 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2486 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2488 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2490 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2491 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2493 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2494 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2496 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2498 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2502 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2504 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2506 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2507 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2508 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2509 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2510 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2512 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2513 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2515 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2516 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2518 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2519 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2521 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2522 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2523 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2527 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2528 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2529 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2530 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2531 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2532 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2533 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2534 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2535 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2536 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2537 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2538 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2539 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2540 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2542 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2544 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2545 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2547 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2549 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2551 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2552 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2554 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2556 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2557 without a trailing newline.
2559 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2560 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2562 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2565 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2569 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2571 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2573 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2574 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2575 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2576 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2578 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2580 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2581 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2582 be printed without leading spaces.
2584 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2585 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2590 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2591 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2592 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2594 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2596 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2597 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2599 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2600 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2602 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2603 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2605 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2607 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2609 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2611 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2612 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2614 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2616 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2618 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2619 byte offsets are specified.
2622 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2625 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2628 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2629 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2630 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2631 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2632 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2633 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2634 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2635 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2636 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2637 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2638 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2639 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2640 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2641 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2642 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2643 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2644 directory where M has write access.
2645 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2646 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2647 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2650 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2651 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2652 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2653 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2654 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2655 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2656 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2657 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2658 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2659 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2660 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2661 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2662 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2663 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2664 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2665 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2666 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2667 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2668 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2669 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2670 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2671 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2672 appeared one additional time.
2674 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2675 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2676 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2677 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2680 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2681 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2682 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2683 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2684 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2685 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2686 if there were more than 338.
2688 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2689 - false --help now exits nonzero
2692 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2693 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2694 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2695 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2698 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2699 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2700 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2701 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2702 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2705 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2706 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2707 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2708 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2709 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2710 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2711 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2714 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2715 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2716 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2717 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2718 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2719 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2721 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2722 under certain unusual conditions
2723 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2724 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2727 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2728 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2729 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2730 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2731 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2732 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2733 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2734 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2735 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2736 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2737 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2738 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2739 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2740 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2741 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2742 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2745 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2746 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2749 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2750 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2751 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2752 involving hard-linked directories
2753 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2754 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2755 character-special and block files
2758 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2759 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2760 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2761 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2762 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2763 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2764 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2765 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2766 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2768 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2769 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2770 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2771 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2772 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2773 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2774 specified on the command line.
2775 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2776 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2777 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2778 the first file untouched.
2779 * readlink: new program
2780 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2781 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2782 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2783 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2784 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2785 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2788 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2789 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2790 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2791 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2792 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2793 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2794 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2795 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2796 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2797 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2798 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2799 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2801 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2802 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2803 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2805 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2806 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2807 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2808 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2809 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2810 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2811 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2812 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2815 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2816 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2819 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2820 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2821 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2822 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2823 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2824 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2825 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2828 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2829 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2831 ========================================================================
2832 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2833 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2836 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2838 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2839 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2840 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2841 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2842 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2843 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2844 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2845 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2846 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2847 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2848 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2849 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2851 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2852 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2853 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2854 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2856 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2859 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2861 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2862 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2863 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2864 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2865 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2866 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2867 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2870 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2871 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2872 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2873 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2874 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2875 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2876 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2877 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2878 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2879 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2880 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2881 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2882 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2883 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2884 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2885 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2887 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2888 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2890 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2891 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2892 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2893 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2894 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2895 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2897 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2898 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2899 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2900 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2901 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2902 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2903 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2905 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2906 the source files in the following example:
2907 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2908 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2909 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2910 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2911 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2912 links between source files with --preserve=links
2913 * cp accepts new options:
2914 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2915 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2916 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2917 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2918 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2919 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2920 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2921 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2922 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2924 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2925 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2926 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2927 even though it's older than dest.
2928 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
2929 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
2930 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
2931 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
2932 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
2934 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
2935 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
2936 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
2937 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
2938 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
2939 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
2940 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
2942 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
2943 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
2944 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
2946 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
2947 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
2948 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
2949 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
2950 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
2951 This is the default.
2953 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
2954 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
2955 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
2956 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
2957 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
2959 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
2962 ========================================================================
2963 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
2964 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2967 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
2968 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
2970 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2971 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
2972 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
2973 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
2974 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
2976 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
2977 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
2978 that specifies a non-directory
2981 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
2982 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
2983 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
2984 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
2985 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2986 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
2987 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
2988 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2989 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
2990 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
2991 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
2992 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
2993 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
2994 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
2995 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
2996 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
2997 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
2998 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
2999 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3000 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3001 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3002 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3003 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3004 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3006 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3007 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3008 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3010 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3012 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3013 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3015 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3016 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3017 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3018 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3019 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3021 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3022 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3023 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3024 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3025 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3027 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3029 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3030 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3031 * still more portability fixes
3032 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3033 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3035 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3037 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3039 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3041 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3042 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3043 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3044 there is any time remaining
3045 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3047 ========================================================================
3048 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3049 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3051 This package began as the union of the following:
3052 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3054 ========================================================================
3056 Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3058 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3059 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3060 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3061 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3062 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3063 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.