1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.?? (2008-??-??) [stable]
7 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
9 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
10 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
12 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
13 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
15 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
16 in more cases when a directory is empty.
18 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
19 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
20 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
24 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
25 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
27 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
28 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
29 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
30 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
34 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
35 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
37 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
39 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
43 mkdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout, not stderr.
46 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
50 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
51 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
54 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
58 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
59 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
60 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
62 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
63 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
64 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
65 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
69 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
70 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
71 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
72 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
75 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
79 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
81 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
82 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
83 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
86 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
90 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
91 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
93 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
95 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
97 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
99 ** Programs no longer installed by default
103 ** Changes in behavior
105 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
106 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
108 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
109 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
111 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
112 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
113 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
117 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
118 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
119 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
120 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
121 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
122 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
123 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
124 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
125 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
126 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
127 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
129 The following commands and options now support the standard size
130 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
131 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
134 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
137 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
138 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
139 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
141 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
142 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
143 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
148 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
149 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
150 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
151 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
153 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
154 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
155 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
156 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
157 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
158 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
159 of "make check" fail.
161 ** Remove deprecated options
163 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
164 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
165 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
166 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
167 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
169 ** Improved robustness
171 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
172 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
173 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
174 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
175 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
176 loss of the contents of a/f.
178 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
179 in its 35-colon commmand-line argument
183 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
184 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
185 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
187 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
188 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
189 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
190 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
192 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
193 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
194 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
195 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
196 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
197 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
198 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
199 destination is a symlink.
201 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
203 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
204 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
206 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
207 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
209 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
211 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
212 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
214 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
215 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
217 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
220 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
221 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
223 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
224 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
226 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
227 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
228 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
229 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
231 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
232 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
233 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
235 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
236 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
237 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
239 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
240 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
241 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
242 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
244 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
245 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
246 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
248 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
249 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
251 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
252 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
254 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
256 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
257 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
258 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
260 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
261 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
263 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
264 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
266 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
267 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
269 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
270 [present in the original version]
273 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
277 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
279 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
280 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
281 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
283 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
284 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
286 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
290 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
291 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
293 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
294 support but with insufficient /proc support.
296 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
297 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
299 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
300 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
301 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
302 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
303 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
304 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
306 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
307 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
310 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
311 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
313 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
316 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
317 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
318 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
320 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
321 directory is unreadable.
323 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
324 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
325 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
327 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
328 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
329 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
330 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
331 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
334 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
335 Before it would print nothing.
337 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
339 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
340 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
341 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
342 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
343 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
344 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
345 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
346 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
348 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
352 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
353 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
354 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
356 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
357 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
358 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
359 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
362 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
366 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
367 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
368 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
369 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
370 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
371 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
372 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
374 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
375 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
376 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
377 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
378 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
379 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
380 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
381 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
383 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
384 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
385 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
388 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
392 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
393 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
395 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
396 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
397 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
399 ** Improved robustness
401 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
402 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
403 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
406 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
410 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
411 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
412 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
413 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
414 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
416 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
420 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
423 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
427 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
428 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
429 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
430 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
432 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
433 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
435 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
436 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
437 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
440 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
442 ** Improved robustness
444 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
445 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
447 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
448 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
449 or NFS-mounted partition.
451 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
452 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
456 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
457 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
458 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
459 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
460 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
461 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
463 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
464 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
466 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
467 or neglect to report file removal.
469 For the "groups" command:
471 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
472 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
474 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
476 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
478 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
482 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
483 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
486 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
488 ** Changes in behavior
490 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
491 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
492 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
493 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
495 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
496 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
497 a final `./' or `../' component.
499 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
500 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
503 ** Infrastructure changes
505 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
506 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
507 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
508 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
512 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
515 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
516 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
517 dirent.d_type support.
519 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
520 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
522 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
523 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
524 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
525 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
528 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
530 ** Changes in behavior
532 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
536 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
537 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
541 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
542 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
543 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
545 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
546 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
548 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
549 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
551 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
553 ** Improved robustness
555 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
556 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
557 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
559 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
560 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
563 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
564 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
566 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
567 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
569 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
570 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
572 ** Changes in behavior
574 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
575 where the two are distinct.
577 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
578 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
579 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
580 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
581 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
582 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
583 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
584 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
585 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
586 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
587 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
588 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
589 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
590 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
591 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
592 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
593 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
595 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
596 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
597 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
599 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
600 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
601 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
602 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
605 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
606 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
610 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
611 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
612 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
613 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
615 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
616 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
617 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
619 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
620 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
621 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
622 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
623 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
626 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
627 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
629 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
630 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
631 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
632 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
634 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
635 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
636 successful and the output is easier to parse.
638 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
639 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
640 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
641 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
643 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
644 and sticky) with the -m option.
646 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
647 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
648 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
649 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
650 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
652 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
653 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
655 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
659 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
660 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
661 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
662 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
664 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
666 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
668 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
669 silently ignoring one of them.
671 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
672 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
673 containing this change was 5.92.
675 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
676 automatically newline terminated.
678 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
679 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
680 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
681 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
684 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
685 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
686 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
689 ** Scheduled for removal
691 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
692 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
694 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
695 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
696 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
697 command to unlink a directory.
699 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
700 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
701 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
702 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
706 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
707 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
708 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
709 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
710 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
711 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
715 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
716 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
718 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
720 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
721 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
722 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
724 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
725 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
728 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
729 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
731 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
732 list directories before files.
734 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
735 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
736 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
737 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
740 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
742 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
744 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
745 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
746 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
748 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
749 list of NUL-terminated file names.
753 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
754 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
755 usually printing nothing.
757 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
759 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
760 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
761 them with hard-linked directories.
763 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
764 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
765 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
767 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
768 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
769 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
771 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
774 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
775 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
777 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
778 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
780 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
781 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
783 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
784 all command-line arguments.
786 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
788 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
790 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
791 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
793 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
795 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
796 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
797 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
798 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
799 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
801 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
802 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
804 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
805 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
806 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
807 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
809 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
811 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
815 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
816 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
818 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
819 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
821 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
822 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
824 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
825 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
827 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
828 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
830 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
832 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
833 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
834 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
837 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
839 ** Build-related bug fixes
841 installing .mo files would fail
844 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
848 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
850 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
853 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
857 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
858 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
862 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
864 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
865 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
867 ** Deprecated options
869 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
870 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
872 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
876 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
878 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
879 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
880 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
881 conforming to older POSIX versions.
883 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
886 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
892 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
897 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
899 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
901 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
902 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
903 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
905 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
906 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
907 problematic usages. These include:
909 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
910 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
911 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
912 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
913 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
914 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
915 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
916 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
917 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
919 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
920 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
922 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
923 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
924 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
925 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
927 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
928 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
929 between binary and text files.
931 The following programs now always use text input/output:
935 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
939 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
940 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
943 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
945 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
946 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
948 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
949 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
950 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
952 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
954 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
956 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
957 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
958 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
962 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
964 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
965 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
967 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
968 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
969 blocks until F contains N blocks.
973 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
974 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
978 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
979 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
980 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
984 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
985 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
989 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
991 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
993 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
997 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
998 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
999 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1001 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1002 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1003 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1004 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1005 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1007 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
1011 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
1012 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
1013 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
1015 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
1017 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
1018 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
1019 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
1020 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
1022 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
1024 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
1025 rather than silently wrapping around.
1027 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
1028 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
1030 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
1031 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
1033 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
1034 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
1035 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
1036 file /tmp/a/b/file".
1038 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
1040 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
1042 ** Improved robustness
1044 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
1045 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
1046 no matter how large the result.
1048 ** Improved portability
1050 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
1051 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
1053 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
1055 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
1056 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
1057 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
1059 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
1060 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
1064 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
1065 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
1067 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
1069 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
1070 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
1071 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
1072 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
1074 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
1075 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
1077 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
1078 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
1079 categories if not specified by dircolors.
1081 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
1083 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
1084 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
1086 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
1087 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
1089 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
1091 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
1092 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
1094 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
1095 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
1097 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
1098 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
1099 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
1101 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
1103 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
1105 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
1109 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
1111 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
1112 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
1113 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
1115 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
1116 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
1118 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
1119 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
1120 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
1122 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
1123 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
1125 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
1126 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
1127 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
1128 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
1130 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
1131 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
1133 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
1134 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
1135 the file system does not support it.
1137 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
1139 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
1140 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
1142 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
1144 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
1145 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
1147 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
1148 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
1149 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
1150 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
1152 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
1153 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
1156 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
1157 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
1158 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
1159 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
1161 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
1162 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
1163 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
1164 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
1166 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
1167 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
1169 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
1171 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
1172 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
1173 reporting incorrect results.
1177 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
1178 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
1180 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
1183 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
1185 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
1186 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
1188 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
1189 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
1191 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
1194 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
1195 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
1196 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
1197 the file name does not look like a page range.
1199 printf has several changes:
1201 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
1202 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
1204 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
1205 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
1206 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
1208 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
1209 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
1212 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
1213 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
1215 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
1216 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
1218 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
1220 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
1221 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
1223 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
1225 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
1227 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
1228 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
1229 when first encountering the directory.
1233 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
1234 output; POSIX requires this.
1236 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
1237 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
1239 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
1241 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
1242 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
1244 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
1245 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
1247 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
1248 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
1249 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
1250 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
1251 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
1252 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
1253 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
1255 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
1256 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
1257 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
1259 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
1260 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
1262 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
1264 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
1266 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
1267 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
1268 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
1269 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
1271 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
1275 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
1276 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
1277 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
1278 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
1279 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
1281 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
1282 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
1283 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
1285 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
1286 is longer than PATH_MAX.
1288 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
1289 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
1291 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
1292 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
1293 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
1294 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
1295 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
1297 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
1298 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
1300 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
1301 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
1303 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
1305 nocreat do not create the output file
1306 excl fail if the output file already exists
1307 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
1308 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
1310 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
1312 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
1313 direct use direct I/O for data
1314 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
1315 sync likewise, but also for metadata
1316 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
1317 nofollow do not follow symlinks
1318 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
1320 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
1322 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
1323 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
1326 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
1327 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
1328 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
1329 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
1330 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
1331 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
1333 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1334 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1336 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
1339 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
1341 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
1343 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
1344 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
1346 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
1347 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
1348 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
1350 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
1351 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
1352 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
1354 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
1356 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
1357 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
1359 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
1360 for compatibility with bash.
1362 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
1364 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
1365 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
1366 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
1367 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
1369 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
1370 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
1372 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
1373 ls supports TABSIZE.
1374 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
1375 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
1376 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
1378 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
1381 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
1383 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
1384 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
1385 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
1386 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
1387 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
1388 an offset, not as a file name.
1390 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
1391 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
1393 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
1394 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
1396 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
1397 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
1399 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
1400 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
1401 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
1403 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
1404 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
1406 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
1407 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
1411 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
1413 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
1415 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
1419 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
1420 or more arguments between partitions.
1422 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
1423 holes in the destination.
1425 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
1426 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
1427 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
1428 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
1429 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
1430 terminates immediately.
1432 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
1434 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
1436 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
1437 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
1438 not the empty string.
1440 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
1441 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
1445 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
1446 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
1447 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
1450 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
1457 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
1461 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
1462 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
1464 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
1465 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
1467 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
1468 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
1469 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
1472 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
1476 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
1477 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
1479 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
1480 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
1482 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
1483 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
1484 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
1486 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
1488 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
1491 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
1493 ** Configuration option
1495 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
1496 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
1500 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
1501 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
1505 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
1506 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
1507 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
1510 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
1511 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
1512 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
1513 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
1514 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
1515 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
1516 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
1519 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
1523 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
1524 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
1525 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
1527 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
1528 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
1530 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
1532 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
1533 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
1534 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
1535 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
1537 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
1539 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
1540 not just the ones that reference directories
1542 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
1543 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
1545 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
1546 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
1547 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
1549 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
1550 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
1551 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
1552 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
1553 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
1554 ragged when a datum was too wide.
1556 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
1561 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
1562 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
1564 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
1566 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
1568 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
1570 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
1571 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
1573 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
1574 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
1576 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
1578 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
1582 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
1584 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
1586 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
1587 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
1588 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
1589 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
1590 resolution is the best we can do right now.
1592 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
1593 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
1595 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
1596 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
1598 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
1599 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
1601 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
1602 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
1603 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
1607 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
1608 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
1609 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
1610 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
1611 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
1612 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
1613 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
1614 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
1615 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
1616 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
1617 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
1618 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
1619 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
1620 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
1622 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
1624 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
1625 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
1627 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
1629 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
1631 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
1632 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
1634 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
1636 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
1637 without a trailing newline.
1639 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
1640 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
1642 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
1645 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
1649 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
1651 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
1653 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
1654 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
1655 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
1656 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
1658 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
1660 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
1661 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
1662 be printed without leading spaces.
1664 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
1665 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
1670 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
1671 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
1672 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
1674 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
1676 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
1677 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
1679 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
1680 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
1682 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
1683 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
1685 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
1687 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
1689 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
1691 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
1692 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
1694 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
1696 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
1698 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
1699 byte offsets are specified.
1702 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
1705 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
1708 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
1709 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
1710 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
1711 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
1712 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
1713 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
1714 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
1715 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
1716 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
1717 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
1718 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
1719 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
1720 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
1721 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
1722 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
1723 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
1724 directory where M has write access.
1725 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
1726 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
1727 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
1730 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
1731 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
1732 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
1733 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
1734 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
1735 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
1736 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
1737 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
1738 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
1739 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
1740 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
1741 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
1742 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
1743 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
1744 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
1745 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
1746 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
1747 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
1748 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
1749 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
1750 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
1751 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
1752 appeared one additional time.
1754 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
1755 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
1756 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
1757 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
1760 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
1761 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
1762 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
1763 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
1764 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
1765 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
1766 if there were more than 338.
1768 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
1769 - false --help now exits nonzero
1772 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
1773 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
1774 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
1775 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
1778 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
1779 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
1780 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
1781 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
1782 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
1785 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
1786 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
1787 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
1788 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
1789 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
1790 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
1791 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
1794 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
1795 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
1796 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
1797 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
1798 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
1799 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
1801 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
1802 under certain unusual conditions
1803 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
1804 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
1807 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
1808 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
1809 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
1810 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
1811 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
1812 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
1813 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
1814 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
1815 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
1816 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
1817 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
1818 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
1819 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
1820 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
1821 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
1822 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
1825 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
1826 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
1829 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
1830 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
1831 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
1832 involving hard-linked directories
1833 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
1834 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
1835 character-special and block files
1838 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
1839 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
1840 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
1841 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
1842 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
1843 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
1844 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
1845 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
1846 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
1848 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
1849 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
1850 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
1851 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
1852 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
1853 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
1854 specified on the command line.
1855 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
1856 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
1857 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
1858 the first file untouched.
1859 * readlink: new program
1860 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
1861 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
1862 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
1863 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
1864 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
1865 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
1868 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
1869 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
1870 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
1871 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
1872 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
1873 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
1874 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
1875 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
1876 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
1877 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
1878 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
1879 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
1881 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
1882 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
1883 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
1885 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
1886 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
1887 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
1888 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
1889 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
1890 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
1891 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
1892 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
1895 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
1896 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
1899 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
1900 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
1901 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
1902 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
1903 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
1904 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
1905 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
1908 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
1909 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
1911 ========================================================================
1912 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
1913 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
1916 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
1918 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
1919 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
1920 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
1921 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
1922 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
1923 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
1924 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
1925 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
1926 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
1927 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
1928 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
1929 The old options will continue to work for a while.
1931 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
1932 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
1933 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
1934 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
1936 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
1939 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
1941 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
1942 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
1943 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
1944 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
1945 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
1946 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
1947 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
1950 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
1951 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
1952 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
1953 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
1954 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
1955 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
1956 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
1957 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
1958 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
1959 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
1960 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
1961 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
1962 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
1963 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
1964 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
1965 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
1967 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
1968 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
1970 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
1971 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
1972 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
1973 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
1974 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
1975 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
1977 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
1978 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
1979 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
1980 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
1981 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
1982 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
1983 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
1985 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
1986 the source files in the following example:
1987 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
1988 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
1989 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
1990 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
1991 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
1992 links between source files with --preserve=links
1993 * cp accepts new options:
1994 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
1995 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
1996 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
1997 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
1998 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
1999 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2000 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2001 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2002 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2004 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2005 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2006 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2007 even though it's older than dest.
2008 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
2009 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
2010 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
2011 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
2012 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
2014 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
2015 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
2016 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
2017 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
2018 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
2019 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
2020 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
2022 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
2023 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
2024 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
2026 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
2027 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
2028 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
2029 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
2030 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
2031 This is the default.
2033 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
2034 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
2035 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
2036 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
2037 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
2039 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
2042 ========================================================================
2043 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
2044 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2047 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
2048 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
2050 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2051 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
2052 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
2053 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
2054 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
2056 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
2057 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
2058 that specifies a non-directory
2061 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
2062 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
2063 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
2064 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
2065 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2066 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
2067 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
2068 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2069 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
2070 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
2071 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
2072 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
2073 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
2074 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
2075 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
2076 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
2077 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
2078 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
2079 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
2080 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
2081 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
2082 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
2083 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
2084 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
2086 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
2087 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
2088 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
2090 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
2092 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
2093 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
2095 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
2096 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
2097 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
2098 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
2099 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
2101 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
2102 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
2103 required support; from Bruno Haible.
2104 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
2105 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
2107 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
2109 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
2110 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
2111 * still more portability fixes
2112 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
2113 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2115 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
2117 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
2119 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
2121 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
2122 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
2123 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
2124 there is any time remaining
2125 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
2127 ========================================================================
2128 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2129 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
2131 This package began as the union of the following:
2132 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
2134 ========================================================================
2136 Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 Free Software
2139 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
2140 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
2141 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
2142 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
2143 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
2144 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.