1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
8 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
9 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
10 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
12 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
13 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
15 ** Changes in behavior
17 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
18 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
20 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
21 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
22 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive. To obtain
23 a full resolution time stamp for %X, use %.X; if you want (say) just
24 3 fractional digits, use %.3X. Likewise for %Y and %Z.
26 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
27 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
28 the same way as the others.
31 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
35 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
36 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
37 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
39 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
40 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
42 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
43 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
44 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
46 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
47 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
49 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
50 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
52 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
53 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
54 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
56 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
57 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
58 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
59 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
63 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
64 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
66 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
69 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
70 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
72 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
74 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
75 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
76 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
78 ** Changes in behavior
80 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
81 rather than its aliased target.
83 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
84 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
85 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
87 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
88 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
89 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
90 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
91 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
92 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
93 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
94 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
96 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
98 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
100 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
101 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
104 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
105 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
106 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
107 control like taskset for example.
109 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
111 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
112 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
113 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
114 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
115 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
116 includes %C when context information is available.
118 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
119 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
120 rather than a file system attribute.
122 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
123 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
124 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
125 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
127 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
128 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
129 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
131 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
132 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
133 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
136 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
140 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
141 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
143 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
145 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
146 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
148 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
149 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
150 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
151 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
153 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
154 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
155 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
159 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
160 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
162 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
163 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
164 duration after the initial signal was sent.
166 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
167 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
168 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
169 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
170 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
171 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
172 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
173 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
174 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
176 ** Changes in behavior
178 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
179 sequence when it would be a no-op.
181 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
182 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
185 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
189 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
190 of available processors, which may not have been the case
191 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
192 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
196 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
197 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
199 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
200 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
201 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
202 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
204 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
205 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
206 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
209 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
213 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
214 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
215 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
217 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
218 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
219 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
221 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
222 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
224 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
225 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
226 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
227 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
229 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
230 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
231 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
233 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
234 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
235 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
236 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
238 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
239 renamed-aside and then recreated.
240 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
242 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
243 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
244 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
245 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
247 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
248 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
249 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
251 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
252 processes will not intersperse their output.
253 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
256 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
260 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
261 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
263 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
264 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
266 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
267 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
268 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
269 the presence of the empty string argument.
270 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
272 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
273 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
274 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
275 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
277 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
278 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
280 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
281 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
282 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
284 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
285 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
286 and with a malicious user on the same system
287 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
288 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
291 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
295 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
296 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
297 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
299 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
300 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
301 offending directory and all "contents."
303 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
304 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
305 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
307 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
308 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
309 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
311 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
312 processes will not intersperse their output.
313 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
314 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
316 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
317 output the name of the file to stdout.
318 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
320 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
321 call fails with errno == EACCES.
322 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
324 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
325 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
328 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
329 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
330 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
332 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
333 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
334 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
335 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
336 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
337 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
339 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
340 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
341 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
342 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
344 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
345 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
347 ** Changes in behavior
349 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
350 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
351 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
352 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
353 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
355 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
356 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
357 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
358 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
360 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
362 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
363 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
364 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
365 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
366 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
370 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
374 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
375 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
377 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
378 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
380 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
381 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
382 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
384 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
385 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
388 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
392 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
393 when the source file doesn't have write access.
394 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
396 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
397 to accommodate leap seconds.
398 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
400 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
401 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
402 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
404 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
406 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
407 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
408 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
410 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
411 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
412 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
413 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
414 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
418 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
419 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
420 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
421 directory or a symlink to a directory.
423 ** Changes in behavior
425 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
426 environment variable is set.
428 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
429 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
430 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
434 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
435 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
436 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
437 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
439 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
440 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
441 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
442 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
446 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
447 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
448 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
450 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
451 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
452 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
453 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
454 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
455 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
458 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
459 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
462 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
466 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
467 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
468 and libraries tested at configure time.
469 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
471 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
472 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
474 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
475 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
477 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
478 printing a summary to stderr.
479 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
481 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
482 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
483 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
485 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
486 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
488 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
489 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
490 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
491 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
493 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
494 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
495 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
496 which is relatively unusual.
497 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
499 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
500 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
501 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
502 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
503 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
504 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
505 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
509 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
510 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
511 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
512 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
513 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
517 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
518 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
520 ** Changes in behavior
522 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
523 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
524 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
525 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
526 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
529 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
533 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
534 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
536 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
537 before data copying has started.
539 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
540 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
542 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
543 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
544 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
545 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
547 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
548 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
549 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
550 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
552 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
557 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
558 for its standard streams.
560 ** Changes in behavior
562 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
563 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
564 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
565 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
566 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
567 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
569 ** Deprecated options
571 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
572 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
576 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
578 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
579 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
582 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
584 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
585 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
587 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
588 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
591 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
595 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
596 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
597 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
598 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
600 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
601 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
602 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
603 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
604 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
609 make check: two tests have been corrected
613 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
614 inherited from gnulib.
617 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
621 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
622 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
623 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
624 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
626 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
627 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
629 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
631 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
632 systems without xattr support.
634 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
635 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
636 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
638 ** Changes in behavior
640 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
641 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
642 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
643 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
645 ** Improved robustness
647 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
648 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
649 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
650 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
651 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
652 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
653 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
654 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
655 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
659 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
660 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
662 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
663 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
664 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
665 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
666 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
669 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
673 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
674 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
675 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
679 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
680 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
681 data was read, or on process exit.
682 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
684 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
685 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
686 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
687 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
689 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
690 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
691 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
692 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
694 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
695 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
697 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
698 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
700 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
701 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
702 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
704 ** Changes in behavior
706 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
707 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
708 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
710 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
711 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
713 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
714 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
715 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
718 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
722 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
724 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
725 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
726 install: Never copies xattrs
728 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
729 from overwriting any existing destination file
731 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
732 mode where this feature is available.
734 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
735 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
736 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
737 do not modify the destination at all.
739 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
741 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
745 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
746 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
748 cp uses much less memory in some situations
750 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
751 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
753 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
754 processing the first file name
756 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
757 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
758 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
759 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
761 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
762 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
764 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
765 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
768 ** Changes in behavior
770 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
771 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
773 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
774 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
775 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
777 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
778 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
780 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
782 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
783 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
784 is still marked with a '+'.
787 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
791 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
792 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
796 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
797 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
798 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
799 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
800 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
801 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
803 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
804 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
806 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
807 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
809 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
811 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
812 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
813 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
815 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
816 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
818 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
819 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
820 used to factor large numbers.
822 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
825 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
827 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
829 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
830 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
832 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
833 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
834 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
835 maximum command-line (argv) length.
837 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
838 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
839 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
841 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
842 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
846 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
848 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
849 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
851 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
852 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
854 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
856 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
857 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
861 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
862 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
863 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
865 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
867 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
868 no matter how many files are in a given directory
870 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
871 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
872 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
874 ** Changes in behavior
876 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
877 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
880 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
884 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
886 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
887 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
888 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
890 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
891 with no USERNAME argument.
893 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
894 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
895 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
897 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
898 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
899 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
900 number of fields for some inputs.
902 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
903 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
905 ** Changes in behavior
907 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
908 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
911 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
915 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
917 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
918 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
919 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
920 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
922 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
923 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
925 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
926 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
928 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
929 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
931 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
932 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
933 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
934 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
936 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
937 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
938 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
939 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
940 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
941 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
943 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
944 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
946 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
947 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
948 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
950 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
951 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
953 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
954 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
956 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
957 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
958 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
959 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
961 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
962 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
964 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
965 in more cases when a directory is empty.
967 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
968 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
969 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
973 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
974 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
976 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
977 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
978 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
979 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
983 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
984 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
986 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
988 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
992 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
993 which have negative errno values.
997 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1001 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1005 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1006 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1009 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1013 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1014 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1015 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1017 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1018 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1019 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1020 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1024 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1025 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1026 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1027 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1030 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1034 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1036 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1037 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1038 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1041 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1045 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1046 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1048 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1050 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1052 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1054 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1058 ** Changes in behavior
1060 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1061 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1063 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1064 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1066 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1067 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1068 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1072 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1073 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1074 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1075 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1076 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1077 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1078 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1079 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1080 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1081 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1082 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1084 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1085 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1086 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1089 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1092 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1093 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1094 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1096 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1097 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1098 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1101 ** New build options
1103 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1104 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1105 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1106 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1108 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1109 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1110 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1111 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1112 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1113 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1114 of "make check" fail.
1116 ** Remove deprecated options
1118 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1119 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1120 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1121 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1122 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1124 ** Improved robustness
1126 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1127 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1128 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1129 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1130 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1131 loss of the contents of a/f.
1133 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1134 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1138 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1139 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1140 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1142 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1143 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1144 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1145 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1147 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1148 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1149 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1150 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1151 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1152 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1153 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1154 destination is a symlink.
1156 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1158 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1159 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1161 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1162 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1164 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1166 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1167 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1169 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1170 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1172 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1175 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1176 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1178 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1179 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1181 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1182 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1183 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1184 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1186 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1187 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1188 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1190 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1191 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1192 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1194 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1195 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1196 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1197 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1199 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1200 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1201 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1203 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1204 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1206 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1207 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1209 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1211 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1212 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1213 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1215 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1216 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1218 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1219 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1221 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1222 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1224 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1225 [present in the original version]
1228 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1232 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1234 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1235 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1236 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1238 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1239 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1241 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1245 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1246 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1248 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1249 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1251 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1252 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1254 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1255 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1256 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1257 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1258 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1259 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1261 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1262 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1265 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1266 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1268 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1271 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1272 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1273 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1275 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1276 directory is unreadable.
1278 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1279 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1280 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1282 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1283 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1284 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1285 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1286 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1289 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1290 Before it would print nothing.
1292 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1294 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1295 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1296 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1297 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1298 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1299 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1300 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1301 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1303 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1307 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1308 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1309 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1311 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1312 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1313 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1314 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1317 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1321 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1322 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1323 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1324 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1325 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1326 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1327 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1329 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1330 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1331 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1332 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1333 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1334 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1335 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1336 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1338 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1339 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1340 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1343 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1347 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1348 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1350 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1351 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1352 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1354 ** Improved robustness
1356 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1357 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1358 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1361 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1365 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1366 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1367 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1368 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1369 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1371 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1375 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1378 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1382 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1383 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1384 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1385 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1387 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1388 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1390 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1391 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1392 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1395 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1397 ** Improved robustness
1399 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1400 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1402 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1403 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1404 or NFS-mounted partition.
1406 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1407 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1411 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1412 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1413 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1414 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1415 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1416 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1418 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1419 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1421 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1422 or neglect to report file removal.
1424 For the "groups" command:
1426 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1427 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1429 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1431 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1433 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1437 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1438 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1441 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1443 ** Changes in behavior
1445 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1446 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1447 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1448 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1450 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1451 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1452 a final `./' or `../' component.
1454 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1455 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1456 this only for pipes.
1458 ** Infrastructure changes
1460 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1461 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1462 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1463 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1467 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1468 name is "." or "..".
1470 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1471 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1472 dirent.d_type support.
1474 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1475 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1477 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1478 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1479 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1480 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1483 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1485 ** Changes in behavior
1487 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1491 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1492 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1496 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1497 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1498 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1500 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1501 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1503 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1504 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1506 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1508 ** Improved robustness
1510 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1511 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1512 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1514 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1515 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1518 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1519 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1521 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1522 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1524 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1525 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1527 ** Changes in behavior
1529 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1530 where the two are distinct.
1532 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1533 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1534 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1535 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1536 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1537 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1538 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1539 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1540 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1541 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1542 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1543 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1544 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1545 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1546 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1547 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1548 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1550 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1551 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1552 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1554 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1555 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1556 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1557 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1560 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1561 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1565 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1566 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1567 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1568 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1570 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1571 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1572 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1574 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1575 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1576 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1577 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1578 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1581 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1582 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1584 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1585 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1586 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1587 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1589 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1590 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1591 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1593 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1594 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1595 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1596 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1598 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1599 and sticky) with the -m option.
1601 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1602 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1603 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1604 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1605 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1607 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1608 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1610 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1614 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1615 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1616 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1617 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1619 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1621 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1623 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1624 silently ignoring one of them.
1626 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1627 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1628 containing this change was 5.92.
1630 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1631 automatically newline terminated.
1633 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1634 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1635 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1636 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1639 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1640 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1641 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1644 ** Scheduled for removal
1646 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1647 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1649 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1650 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1651 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1652 command to unlink a directory.
1654 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1655 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1656 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1657 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1661 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1662 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1663 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1664 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1665 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1666 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1670 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1671 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1673 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1675 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1676 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1677 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1679 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1680 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1683 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1684 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1686 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1687 list directories before files.
1689 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1690 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1691 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1692 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1695 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1697 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1699 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1700 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1701 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1703 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1704 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1708 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1709 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1710 usually printing nothing.
1712 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1714 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1715 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1716 them with hard-linked directories.
1718 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1719 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1720 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1722 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1723 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1724 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1726 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1729 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1730 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1732 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1733 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1735 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1736 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1738 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1739 all command-line arguments.
1741 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1743 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1745 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1746 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1748 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1750 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1751 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1752 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1753 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1754 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1756 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1757 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1759 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1760 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1761 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1762 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1764 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1766 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1770 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1771 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1773 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1774 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1776 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1777 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1779 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1780 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1782 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1783 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1785 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1787 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1788 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1789 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1792 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1794 ** Build-related bug fixes
1796 installing .mo files would fail
1799 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1803 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1805 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1808 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1812 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1813 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1817 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1819 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1820 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1822 ** Deprecated options
1824 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1825 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1827 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1831 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1833 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1834 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1835 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1836 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1838 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1841 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1847 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1852 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1854 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1856 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1857 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1858 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1860 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1861 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1862 problematic usages. These include:
1864 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1865 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1866 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1867 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1868 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1869 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1870 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1871 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1872 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1874 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1875 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1877 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1878 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1879 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1880 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1882 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1883 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1884 between binary and text files.
1886 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1890 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1894 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1895 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1897 head tac tail tee tr
1898 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1900 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1901 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1903 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1904 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1905 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1907 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1909 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1911 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1912 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1913 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1917 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1919 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1920 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1922 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1923 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1924 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1928 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1929 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1933 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1934 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1935 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1939 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1940 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1944 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1946 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1948 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1952 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1953 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1954 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1956 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1957 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1958 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1959 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1960 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1962 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
1966 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
1967 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
1968 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
1970 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
1972 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
1973 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
1974 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
1975 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
1977 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
1979 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
1980 rather than silently wrapping around.
1982 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
1983 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
1985 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
1986 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
1988 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
1989 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
1990 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
1991 file /tmp/a/b/file".
1993 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
1995 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
1997 ** Improved robustness
1999 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2000 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2001 no matter how large the result.
2003 ** Improved portability
2005 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2006 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2008 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2010 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2011 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2012 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2014 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2015 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2019 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2020 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2022 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2024 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2025 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2026 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2027 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2029 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2030 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2032 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2033 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2034 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2036 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2038 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2039 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2041 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2042 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2044 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2046 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2047 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2049 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2050 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2052 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2053 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2054 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2056 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2058 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2060 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2064 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2066 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2067 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2068 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2070 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2071 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2073 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2074 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2075 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2077 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2078 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2080 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2081 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2082 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2083 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2085 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2086 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2088 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2089 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2090 the file system does not support it.
2092 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2094 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2095 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2097 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2099 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2100 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2102 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2103 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2104 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2105 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2107 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2108 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2111 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2112 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2113 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2114 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2116 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2117 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2118 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2119 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2121 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2122 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2124 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2126 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2127 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2128 reporting incorrect results.
2132 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2133 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2135 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2138 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2140 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2141 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2143 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2144 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2146 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2149 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2150 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2151 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2152 the file name does not look like a page range.
2154 printf has several changes:
2156 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2157 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2159 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2160 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2161 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2163 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2164 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2167 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2168 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2170 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2171 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2173 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2175 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2176 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2178 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2180 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2182 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2183 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2184 when first encountering the directory.
2188 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2189 output; POSIX requires this.
2191 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2192 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2194 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2196 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2197 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2199 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2200 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2202 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2203 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2204 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2205 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2206 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2207 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2208 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2210 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2211 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2212 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2214 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2215 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2217 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2219 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2221 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2222 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2223 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2224 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2226 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2230 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2231 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2232 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2233 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2234 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2236 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2237 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2238 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2240 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2241 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2243 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2244 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2246 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2247 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2248 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2249 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2250 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2252 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2253 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2255 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2256 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2258 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2260 nocreat do not create the output file
2261 excl fail if the output file already exists
2262 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2263 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2265 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2267 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2268 direct use direct I/O for data
2269 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2270 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2271 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2272 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2273 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2275 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2277 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2278 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2281 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2282 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2283 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2284 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2285 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2286 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2288 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2289 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2291 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2294 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2296 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2298 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2299 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2301 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2302 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2303 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2305 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2306 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2307 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2309 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2311 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2312 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2314 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2315 for compatibility with bash.
2317 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2319 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2320 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2321 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2322 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2324 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2325 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2327 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2328 ls supports TABSIZE.
2329 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2330 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2331 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2333 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2336 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2338 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2339 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2340 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2341 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2342 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2343 an offset, not as a file name.
2345 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2346 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2348 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2349 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2351 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2352 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2354 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2355 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2356 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2358 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2359 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2361 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2362 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2366 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2368 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2370 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2374 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2375 or more arguments between partitions.
2377 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2378 holes in the destination.
2380 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2381 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2382 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2383 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2384 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2385 terminates immediately.
2387 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2389 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2391 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2392 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2393 not the empty string.
2395 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2396 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2400 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2401 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2402 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2405 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2412 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2416 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2417 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2419 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2420 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2422 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2423 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2424 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2427 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2431 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2432 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2434 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2435 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2437 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2438 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2439 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2441 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2443 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2446 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2448 ** Configuration option
2450 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2451 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2455 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2456 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2460 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2461 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2462 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2465 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2466 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2467 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2468 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2469 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2470 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2471 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2474 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2478 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2479 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2480 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2482 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2483 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2485 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2487 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2488 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2489 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2490 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2492 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2494 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2495 not just the ones that reference directories
2497 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2498 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2500 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2501 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2502 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2504 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2505 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2506 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2507 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2508 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2509 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2511 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2516 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2517 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2519 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2521 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2523 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2525 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2526 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2528 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2529 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2531 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2533 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2537 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2539 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2541 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2542 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2543 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2544 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2545 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2547 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2548 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2550 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2551 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2553 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2554 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2556 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2557 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2558 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2562 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2563 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2564 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2565 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2566 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2567 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2568 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2569 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2570 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2571 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2572 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2573 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2574 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2575 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2577 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2579 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2580 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2582 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2584 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2586 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2587 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2589 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2591 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2592 without a trailing newline.
2594 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2595 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2597 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2600 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2604 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2606 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2608 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2609 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2610 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2611 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2613 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2615 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2616 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2617 be printed without leading spaces.
2619 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2620 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2625 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2626 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2627 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2629 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2631 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2632 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2634 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2635 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2637 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2638 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2640 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2642 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2644 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2646 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2647 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2649 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2651 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2653 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2654 byte offsets are specified.
2657 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2660 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2663 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2664 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2665 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2666 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2667 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2668 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2669 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2670 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2671 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2672 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2673 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2674 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2675 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2676 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2677 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2678 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2679 directory where M has write access.
2680 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2681 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2682 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2685 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2686 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2687 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2688 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2689 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2690 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2691 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2692 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2693 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2694 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2695 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2696 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2697 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2698 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2699 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2700 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2701 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2702 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2703 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2704 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2705 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2706 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2707 appeared one additional time.
2709 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2710 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2711 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2712 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2715 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2716 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2717 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2718 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2719 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2720 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2721 if there were more than 338.
2723 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2724 - false --help now exits nonzero
2727 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2728 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2729 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2730 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2733 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2734 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2735 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2736 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2737 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2740 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2741 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2742 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2743 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2744 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2745 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2746 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2749 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2750 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2751 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2752 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2753 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2754 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2756 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2757 under certain unusual conditions
2758 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2759 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2762 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2763 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2764 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2765 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2766 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2767 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2768 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2769 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2770 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2771 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2772 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2773 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2774 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2775 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2776 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2777 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2780 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2781 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2784 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2785 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2786 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2787 involving hard-linked directories
2788 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2789 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2790 character-special and block files
2793 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2794 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2795 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2796 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2797 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2798 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2799 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2800 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2801 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2803 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2804 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2805 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2806 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2807 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2808 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2809 specified on the command line.
2810 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2811 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2812 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2813 the first file untouched.
2814 * readlink: new program
2815 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2816 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2817 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2818 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2819 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2820 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2823 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2824 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2825 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2826 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2827 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2828 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2829 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2830 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2831 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2832 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2833 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2834 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2836 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2837 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2838 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2840 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2841 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2842 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2843 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2844 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2845 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2846 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2847 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2850 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2851 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2854 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2855 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2856 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2857 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2858 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2859 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2860 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2863 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2864 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2866 ========================================================================
2867 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2868 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2871 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2873 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2874 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2875 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2876 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2877 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2878 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2879 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2880 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2881 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2882 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2883 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2884 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2886 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2887 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2888 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2889 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2891 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2894 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2896 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2897 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2898 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2899 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2900 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2901 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2902 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2905 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2906 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2907 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2908 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2909 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2910 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2911 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2912 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2913 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2914 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2915 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2916 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2917 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2918 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2919 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2920 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2922 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2923 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2925 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2926 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2927 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2928 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2929 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2930 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2932 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2933 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2934 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2935 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2936 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2937 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2938 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2940 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2941 the source files in the following example:
2942 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2943 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2944 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2945 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2946 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2947 links between source files with --preserve=links
2948 * cp accepts new options:
2949 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2950 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2951 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2952 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2953 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2954 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2955 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2956 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2957 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2959 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2960 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2961 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2962 even though it's older than dest.
2963 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
2964 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
2965 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
2966 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
2967 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
2969 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
2970 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
2971 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
2972 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
2973 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
2974 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
2975 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
2977 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
2978 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
2979 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
2981 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
2982 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
2983 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
2984 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
2985 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
2986 This is the default.
2988 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
2989 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
2990 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
2991 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
2992 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
2994 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
2997 ========================================================================
2998 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
2999 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3002 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3003 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3005 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3006 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3007 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3008 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3009 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3011 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3012 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3013 that specifies a non-directory
3016 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3017 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3018 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3019 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3020 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3021 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3022 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3023 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3024 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3025 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3026 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3027 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3028 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3029 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3030 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3031 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3032 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3033 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3034 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3035 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3036 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3037 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3038 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3039 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3041 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3042 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3043 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3045 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3047 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3048 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3050 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3051 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3052 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3053 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3054 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3056 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3057 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3058 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3059 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3060 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3062 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3064 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3065 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3066 * still more portability fixes
3067 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3068 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3070 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3072 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3074 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3076 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3077 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3078 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3079 there is any time remaining
3080 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3082 ========================================================================
3083 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3084 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3086 This package began as the union of the following:
3087 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3089 ========================================================================
3091 Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3093 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3094 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3095 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3096 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3097 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3098 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.