1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
8 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
12 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
15 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
19 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
20 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
21 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
22 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
24 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
25 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
26 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
28 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
29 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
31 ** Changes in behavior
33 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
34 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
36 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
37 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
38 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
39 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
40 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
41 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
43 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
44 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
45 the same way as the others.
48 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
52 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
53 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
54 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
56 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
57 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
59 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
60 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
61 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
63 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
64 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
66 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
67 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
69 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
70 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
71 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
73 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
74 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
75 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
76 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
80 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
81 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
83 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
86 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
87 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
89 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
91 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
92 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
93 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
95 ** Changes in behavior
97 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
98 rather than its aliased target.
100 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
101 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
102 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
104 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
105 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
106 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
107 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
108 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
109 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
110 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
111 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
113 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
115 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
117 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
118 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
121 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
122 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
123 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
124 control like taskset for example.
126 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
128 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
129 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
130 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
131 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
132 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
133 includes %C when context information is available.
135 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
136 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
137 rather than a file system attribute.
139 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
140 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
141 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
142 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
144 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
145 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
146 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
148 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
149 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
150 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
153 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
157 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
158 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
160 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
162 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
163 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
165 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
166 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
167 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
168 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
170 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
171 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
172 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
176 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
177 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
179 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
180 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
181 duration after the initial signal was sent.
183 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
184 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
185 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
186 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
187 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
188 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
189 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
190 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
191 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
193 ** Changes in behavior
195 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
196 sequence when it would be a no-op.
198 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
199 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
202 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
206 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
207 of available processors, which may not have been the case
208 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
209 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
213 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
214 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
216 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
217 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
218 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
219 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
221 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
222 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
223 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
226 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
230 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
231 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
232 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
234 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
235 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
236 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
238 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
239 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
241 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
242 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
243 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
244 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
246 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
247 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
248 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
250 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
251 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
252 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
253 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
255 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
256 renamed-aside and then recreated.
257 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
259 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
260 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
261 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
262 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
264 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
265 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
266 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
268 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
269 processes will not intersperse their output.
270 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
273 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
277 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
278 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
280 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
281 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
283 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
284 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
285 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
286 the presence of the empty string argument.
287 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
289 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
290 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
291 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
292 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
294 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
295 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
297 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
298 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
299 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
301 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
302 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
303 and with a malicious user on the same system
304 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
305 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
308 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
312 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
313 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
314 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
316 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
317 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
318 offending directory and all "contents."
320 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
321 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
322 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
324 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
325 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
326 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
328 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
329 processes will not intersperse their output.
330 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
331 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
333 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
334 output the name of the file to stdout.
335 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
337 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
338 call fails with errno == EACCES.
339 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
341 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
342 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
345 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
346 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
347 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
349 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
350 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
351 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
352 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
353 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
354 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
356 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
357 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
358 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
359 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
361 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
362 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
364 ** Changes in behavior
366 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
367 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
368 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
369 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
370 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
372 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
373 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
374 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
375 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
377 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
379 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
380 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
381 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
382 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
383 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
387 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
391 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
392 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
394 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
395 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
397 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
398 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
399 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
401 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
402 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
405 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
409 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
410 when the source file doesn't have write access.
411 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
413 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
414 to accommodate leap seconds.
415 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
417 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
418 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
419 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
421 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
423 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
424 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
425 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
427 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
428 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
429 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
430 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
431 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
435 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
436 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
437 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
438 directory or a symlink to a directory.
440 ** Changes in behavior
442 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
443 environment variable is set.
445 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
446 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
447 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
451 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
452 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
453 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
454 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
456 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
457 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
458 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
459 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
463 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
464 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
465 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
467 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
468 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
469 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
470 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
471 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
472 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
475 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
476 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
479 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
483 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
484 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
485 and libraries tested at configure time.
486 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
488 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
489 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
491 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
492 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
494 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
495 printing a summary to stderr.
496 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
498 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
499 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
500 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
502 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
503 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
505 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
506 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
507 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
508 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
510 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
511 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
512 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
513 which is relatively unusual.
514 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
516 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
517 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
518 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
519 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
520 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
521 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
522 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
526 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
527 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
528 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
529 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
530 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
534 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
535 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
537 ** Changes in behavior
539 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
540 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
541 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
542 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
543 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
546 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
550 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
551 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
553 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
554 before data copying has started.
556 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
557 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
559 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
560 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
561 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
562 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
564 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
565 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
566 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
567 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
569 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
574 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
575 for its standard streams.
577 ** Changes in behavior
579 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
580 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
581 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
582 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
583 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
584 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
586 ** Deprecated options
588 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
589 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
593 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
595 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
596 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
599 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
601 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
602 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
604 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
605 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
608 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
612 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
613 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
614 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
615 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
617 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
618 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
619 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
620 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
621 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
626 make check: two tests have been corrected
630 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
631 inherited from gnulib.
634 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
638 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
639 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
640 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
641 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
643 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
644 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
646 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
648 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
649 systems without xattr support.
651 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
652 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
653 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
655 ** Changes in behavior
657 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
658 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
659 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
660 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
662 ** Improved robustness
664 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
665 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
666 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
667 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
668 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
669 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
670 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
671 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
672 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
676 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
677 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
679 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
680 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
681 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
682 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
683 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
686 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
690 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
691 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
692 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
696 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
697 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
698 data was read, or on process exit.
699 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
701 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
702 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
703 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
704 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
706 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
707 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
708 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
709 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
711 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
712 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
714 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
715 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
717 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
718 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
719 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
721 ** Changes in behavior
723 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
724 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
725 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
727 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
728 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
730 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
731 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
732 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
735 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
739 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
741 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
742 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
743 install: Never copies xattrs
745 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
746 from overwriting any existing destination file
748 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
749 mode where this feature is available.
751 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
752 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
753 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
754 do not modify the destination at all.
756 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
758 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
762 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
763 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
765 cp uses much less memory in some situations
767 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
768 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
770 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
771 processing the first file name
773 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
774 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
775 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
776 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
778 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
779 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
781 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
782 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
785 ** Changes in behavior
787 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
788 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
790 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
791 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
792 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
794 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
795 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
797 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
799 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
800 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
801 is still marked with a '+'.
804 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
808 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
809 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
813 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
814 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
815 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
816 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
817 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
818 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
820 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
821 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
823 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
824 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
826 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
828 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
829 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
830 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
832 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
833 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
835 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
836 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
837 used to factor large numbers.
839 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
842 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
844 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
846 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
847 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
849 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
850 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
851 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
852 maximum command-line (argv) length.
854 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
855 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
856 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
858 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
859 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
863 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
865 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
866 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
868 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
869 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
871 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
873 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
874 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
878 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
879 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
880 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
882 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
884 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
885 no matter how many files are in a given directory
887 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
888 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
889 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
891 ** Changes in behavior
893 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
894 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
897 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
901 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
903 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
904 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
905 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
907 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
908 with no USERNAME argument.
910 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
911 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
912 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
914 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
915 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
916 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
917 number of fields for some inputs.
919 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
920 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
922 ** Changes in behavior
924 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
925 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
928 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
932 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
934 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
935 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
936 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
937 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
939 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
940 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
942 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
943 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
945 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
946 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
948 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
949 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
950 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
951 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
953 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
954 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
955 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
956 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
957 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
958 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
960 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
961 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
963 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
964 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
965 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
967 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
968 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
970 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
971 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
973 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
974 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
975 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
976 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
978 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
979 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
981 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
982 in more cases when a directory is empty.
984 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
985 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
986 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
990 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
991 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
993 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
994 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
995 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
996 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1000 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1001 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1003 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1005 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1009 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1010 which have negative errno values.
1014 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1018 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1022 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1023 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1026 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1030 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1031 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1032 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1034 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1035 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1036 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1037 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1041 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1042 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1043 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1044 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1047 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1051 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1053 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1054 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1055 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1058 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1062 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1063 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1065 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1067 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1069 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1071 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1075 ** Changes in behavior
1077 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1078 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1080 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1081 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1083 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1084 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1085 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1089 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1090 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1091 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1092 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1093 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1094 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1095 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1096 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1097 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1098 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1099 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1101 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1102 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1103 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1106 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1109 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1110 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1111 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1113 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1114 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1115 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1118 ** New build options
1120 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1121 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1122 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1123 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1125 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1126 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1127 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1128 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1129 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1130 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1131 of "make check" fail.
1133 ** Remove deprecated options
1135 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1136 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1137 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1138 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1139 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1141 ** Improved robustness
1143 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1144 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1145 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1146 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1147 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1148 loss of the contents of a/f.
1150 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1151 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1155 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1156 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1157 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1159 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1160 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1161 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1162 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1164 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1165 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1166 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1167 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1168 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1169 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1170 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1171 destination is a symlink.
1173 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1175 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1176 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1178 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1179 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1181 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1183 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1184 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1186 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1187 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1189 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1192 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1193 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1195 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1196 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1198 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1199 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1200 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1201 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1203 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1204 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1205 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1207 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1208 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1209 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1211 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1212 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1213 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1214 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1216 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1217 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1218 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1220 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1221 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1223 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1224 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1226 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1228 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1229 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1230 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1232 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1233 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1235 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1236 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1238 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1239 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1241 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1242 [present in the original version]
1245 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1249 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1251 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1252 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1253 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1255 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1256 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1258 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1262 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1263 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1265 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1266 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1268 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1269 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1271 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1272 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1273 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1274 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1275 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1276 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1278 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1279 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1282 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1283 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1285 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1288 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1289 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1290 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1292 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1293 directory is unreadable.
1295 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1296 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1297 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1299 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1300 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1301 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1302 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1303 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1306 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1307 Before it would print nothing.
1309 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1311 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1312 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1313 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1314 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1315 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1316 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1317 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1318 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1320 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1324 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1325 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1326 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1328 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1329 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1330 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1331 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1334 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1338 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1339 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1340 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1341 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1342 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1343 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1344 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1346 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1347 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1348 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1349 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1350 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1351 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1352 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1353 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1355 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1356 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1357 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1360 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1364 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1365 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1367 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1368 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1369 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1371 ** Improved robustness
1373 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1374 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1375 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1378 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1382 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1383 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1384 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1385 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1386 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1388 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1392 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1395 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1399 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1400 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1401 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1402 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1404 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1405 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1407 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1408 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1409 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1412 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1414 ** Improved robustness
1416 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1417 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1419 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1420 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1421 or NFS-mounted partition.
1423 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1424 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1428 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1429 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1430 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1431 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1432 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1433 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1435 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1436 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1438 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1439 or neglect to report file removal.
1441 For the "groups" command:
1443 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1444 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1446 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1448 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1450 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1454 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1455 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1458 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1460 ** Changes in behavior
1462 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1463 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1464 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1465 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1467 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1468 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1469 a final `./' or `../' component.
1471 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1472 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1473 this only for pipes.
1475 ** Infrastructure changes
1477 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1478 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1479 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1480 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1484 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1485 name is "." or "..".
1487 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1488 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1489 dirent.d_type support.
1491 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1492 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1494 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1495 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1496 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1497 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1500 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1502 ** Changes in behavior
1504 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1508 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1509 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1513 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1514 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1515 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1517 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1518 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1520 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1521 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1523 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1525 ** Improved robustness
1527 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1528 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1529 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1531 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1532 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1535 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1536 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1538 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1539 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1541 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1542 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1544 ** Changes in behavior
1546 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1547 where the two are distinct.
1549 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1550 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1551 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1552 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1553 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1554 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1555 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1556 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1557 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1558 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1559 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1560 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1561 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1562 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1563 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1564 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1565 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1567 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1568 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1569 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1571 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1572 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1573 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1574 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1577 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1578 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1582 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1583 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1584 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1585 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1587 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1588 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1589 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1591 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1592 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1593 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1594 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1595 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1598 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1599 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1601 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1602 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1603 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1604 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1606 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1607 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1608 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1610 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1611 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1612 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1613 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1615 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1616 and sticky) with the -m option.
1618 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1619 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1620 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1621 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1622 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1624 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1625 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1627 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1631 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1632 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1633 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1634 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1636 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1638 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1640 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1641 silently ignoring one of them.
1643 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1644 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1645 containing this change was 5.92.
1647 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1648 automatically newline terminated.
1650 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1651 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1652 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1653 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1656 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1657 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1658 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1661 ** Scheduled for removal
1663 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1664 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1666 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1667 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1668 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1669 command to unlink a directory.
1671 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1672 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1673 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1674 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1678 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1679 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1680 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1681 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1682 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1683 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1687 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1688 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1690 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1692 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1693 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1694 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1696 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1697 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1700 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1701 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1703 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1704 list directories before files.
1706 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1707 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1708 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1709 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1712 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1714 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1716 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1717 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1718 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1720 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1721 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1725 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1726 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1727 usually printing nothing.
1729 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1731 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1732 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1733 them with hard-linked directories.
1735 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1736 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1737 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1739 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1740 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1741 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1743 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1746 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1747 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1749 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1750 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1752 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1753 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1755 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1756 all command-line arguments.
1758 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1760 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1762 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1763 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1765 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1767 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1768 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1769 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1770 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1771 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1773 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1774 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1776 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1777 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1778 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1779 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1781 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1783 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1787 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1788 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1790 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1791 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1793 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1794 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1796 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1797 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1799 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1800 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1802 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1804 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1805 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1806 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1809 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1811 ** Build-related bug fixes
1813 installing .mo files would fail
1816 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1820 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1822 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1825 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1829 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1830 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1834 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1836 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1837 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1839 ** Deprecated options
1841 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1842 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1844 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1848 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1850 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1851 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1852 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1853 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1855 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1858 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1864 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1869 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1871 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1873 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1874 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1875 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1877 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1878 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1879 problematic usages. These include:
1881 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1882 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1883 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1884 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1885 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1886 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1887 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1888 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1889 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1891 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1892 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1894 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1895 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1896 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1897 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1899 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1900 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1901 between binary and text files.
1903 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1907 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1911 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1912 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1914 head tac tail tee tr
1915 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1917 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1918 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1920 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1921 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1922 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1924 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1926 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1928 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1929 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1930 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1934 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1936 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1937 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1939 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1940 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1941 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1945 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1946 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1950 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1951 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1952 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1956 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1957 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1961 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1963 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1965 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1969 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1970 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1971 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1973 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1974 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1975 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1976 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1977 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1979 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
1983 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
1984 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
1985 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
1987 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
1989 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
1990 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
1991 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
1992 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
1994 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
1996 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
1997 rather than silently wrapping around.
1999 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2000 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2002 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2003 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2005 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2006 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2007 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2008 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2010 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2012 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2014 ** Improved robustness
2016 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2017 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2018 no matter how large the result.
2020 ** Improved portability
2022 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2023 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2025 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2027 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2028 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2029 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2031 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2032 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2036 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2037 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2039 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2041 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2042 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2043 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2044 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2046 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2047 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2049 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2050 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2051 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2053 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2055 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2056 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2058 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2059 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2061 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2063 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2064 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2066 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2067 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2069 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2070 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2071 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2073 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2075 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2077 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2081 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2083 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2084 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2085 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2087 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2088 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2090 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2091 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2092 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2094 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2095 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2097 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2098 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2099 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2100 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2102 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2103 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2105 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2106 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2107 the file system does not support it.
2109 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2111 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2112 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2114 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2116 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2117 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2119 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2120 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2121 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2122 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2124 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2125 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2128 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2129 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2130 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2131 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2133 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2134 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2135 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2136 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2138 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2139 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2141 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2143 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2144 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2145 reporting incorrect results.
2149 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2150 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2152 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2155 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2157 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2158 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2160 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2161 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2163 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2166 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2167 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2168 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2169 the file name does not look like a page range.
2171 printf has several changes:
2173 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2174 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2176 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2177 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2178 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2180 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2181 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2184 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2185 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2187 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2188 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2190 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2192 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2193 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2195 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2197 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2199 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2200 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2201 when first encountering the directory.
2205 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2206 output; POSIX requires this.
2208 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2209 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2211 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2213 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2214 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2216 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2217 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2219 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2220 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2221 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2222 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2223 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2224 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2225 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2227 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2228 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2229 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2231 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2232 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2234 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2236 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2238 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2239 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2240 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2241 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2243 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2247 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2248 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2249 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2250 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2251 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2253 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2254 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2255 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2257 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2258 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2260 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2261 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2263 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2264 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2265 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2266 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2267 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2269 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2270 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2272 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2273 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2275 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2277 nocreat do not create the output file
2278 excl fail if the output file already exists
2279 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2280 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2282 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2284 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2285 direct use direct I/O for data
2286 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2287 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2288 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2289 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2290 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2292 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2294 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2295 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2298 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2299 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2300 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2301 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2302 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2303 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2305 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2306 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2308 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2311 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2313 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2315 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2316 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2318 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2319 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2320 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2322 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2323 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2324 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2326 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2328 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2329 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2331 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2332 for compatibility with bash.
2334 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2336 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2337 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2338 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2339 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2341 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2342 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2344 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2345 ls supports TABSIZE.
2346 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2347 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2348 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2350 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2353 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2355 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2356 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2357 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2358 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2359 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2360 an offset, not as a file name.
2362 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2363 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2365 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2366 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2368 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2369 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2371 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2372 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2373 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2375 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2376 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2378 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2379 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2383 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2385 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2387 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2391 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2392 or more arguments between partitions.
2394 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2395 holes in the destination.
2397 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2398 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2399 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2400 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2401 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2402 terminates immediately.
2404 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2406 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2408 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2409 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2410 not the empty string.
2412 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2413 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2417 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2418 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2419 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2422 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2429 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2433 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2434 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2436 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2437 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2439 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2440 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2441 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2444 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2448 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2449 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2451 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2452 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2454 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2455 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2456 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2458 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2460 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2463 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2465 ** Configuration option
2467 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2468 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2472 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2473 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2477 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2478 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2479 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2482 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2483 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2484 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2485 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2486 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2487 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2488 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2491 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2495 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2496 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2497 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2499 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2500 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2502 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2504 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2505 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2506 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2507 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2509 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2511 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2512 not just the ones that reference directories
2514 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2515 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2517 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2518 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2519 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2521 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2522 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2523 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2524 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2525 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2526 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2528 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2533 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2534 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2536 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2538 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2540 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2542 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2543 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2545 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2546 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2548 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2550 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2554 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2556 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2558 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2559 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2560 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2561 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2562 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2564 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2565 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2567 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2568 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2570 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2571 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2573 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2574 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2575 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2579 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2580 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2581 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2582 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2583 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2584 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2585 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2586 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2587 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2588 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2589 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2590 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2591 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2592 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2594 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2596 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2597 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2599 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2601 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2603 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2604 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2606 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2608 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2609 without a trailing newline.
2611 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2612 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2614 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2617 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2621 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2623 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2625 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2626 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2627 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2628 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2630 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2632 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2633 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2634 be printed without leading spaces.
2636 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2637 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2642 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2643 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2644 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2646 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2648 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2649 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2651 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2652 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2654 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2655 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2657 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2659 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2661 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2663 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2664 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2666 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2668 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2670 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2671 byte offsets are specified.
2674 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2677 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2680 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2681 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2682 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2683 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2684 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2685 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2686 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2687 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2688 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2689 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2690 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2691 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2692 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2693 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2694 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2695 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2696 directory where M has write access.
2697 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2698 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2699 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2702 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2703 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2704 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2705 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2706 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2707 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2708 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2709 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2710 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2711 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2712 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2713 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2714 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2715 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2716 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2717 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2718 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2719 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2720 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2721 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2722 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2723 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2724 appeared one additional time.
2726 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2727 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2728 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2729 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2732 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2733 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2734 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2735 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2736 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2737 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2738 if there were more than 338.
2740 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2741 - false --help now exits nonzero
2744 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2745 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2746 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2747 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2750 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2751 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2752 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2753 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2754 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2757 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2758 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2759 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2760 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2761 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2762 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2763 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2766 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2767 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2768 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2769 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2770 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2771 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2773 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2774 under certain unusual conditions
2775 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2776 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2779 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2780 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2781 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2782 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2783 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2784 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2785 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2786 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2787 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2788 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2789 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2790 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2791 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2792 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2793 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2794 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2797 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2798 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2801 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2802 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2803 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2804 involving hard-linked directories
2805 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2806 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2807 character-special and block files
2810 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2811 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2812 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2813 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2814 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2815 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2816 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2817 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2818 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2820 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2821 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2822 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2823 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2824 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2825 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2826 specified on the command line.
2827 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2828 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2829 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2830 the first file untouched.
2831 * readlink: new program
2832 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2833 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2834 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2835 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2836 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2837 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2840 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2841 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2842 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2843 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2844 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2845 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2846 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2847 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2848 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2849 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2850 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2851 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2853 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2854 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2855 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2857 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2858 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2859 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2860 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2861 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2862 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2863 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2864 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2867 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2868 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2871 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2872 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2873 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2874 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2875 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2876 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2877 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2880 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2881 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2883 ========================================================================
2884 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2885 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2888 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2890 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2891 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2892 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2893 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2894 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2895 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2896 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2897 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2898 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2899 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2900 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2901 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2903 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2904 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2905 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2906 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2908 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2911 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2913 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2914 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2915 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2916 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2917 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2918 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2919 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2922 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2923 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2924 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2925 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2926 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2927 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2928 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2929 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2930 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2931 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2932 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2933 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2934 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2935 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2936 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2937 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2939 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2940 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2942 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2943 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2944 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2945 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2946 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2947 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2949 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2950 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2951 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2952 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2953 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2954 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2955 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2957 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2958 the source files in the following example:
2959 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2960 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2961 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2962 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2963 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2964 links between source files with --preserve=links
2965 * cp accepts new options:
2966 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2967 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2968 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2969 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2970 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2971 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2972 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2973 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2974 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2976 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2977 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2978 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2979 even though it's older than dest.
2980 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
2981 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
2982 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
2983 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
2984 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
2986 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
2987 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
2988 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
2989 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
2990 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
2991 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
2992 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
2994 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
2995 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
2996 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
2998 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
2999 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3000 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3001 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3002 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3003 This is the default.
3005 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3006 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3007 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3008 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3009 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3011 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3014 ========================================================================
3015 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3016 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3019 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3020 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3022 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3023 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3024 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3025 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3026 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3028 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3029 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3030 that specifies a non-directory
3033 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3034 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3035 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3036 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3037 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3038 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3039 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3040 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3041 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3042 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3043 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3044 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3045 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3046 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3047 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3048 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3049 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3050 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3051 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3052 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3053 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3054 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3055 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3056 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3058 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3059 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3060 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3062 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3064 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3065 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3067 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3068 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3069 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3070 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3071 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3073 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3074 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3075 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3076 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3077 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3079 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3081 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3082 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3083 * still more portability fixes
3084 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3085 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3087 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3089 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3091 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3093 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3094 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3095 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3096 there is any time remaining
3097 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3099 ========================================================================
3100 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3101 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3103 This package began as the union of the following:
3104 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3106 ========================================================================
3108 Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3110 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3111 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3112 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3113 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3114 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3115 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.