1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
11 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
13 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
14 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
15 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
18 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
22 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
23 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
25 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
27 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
29 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
31 ** Programs no longer installed by default
35 ** Changes in behavior
37 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
38 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
40 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
41 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
43 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
44 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
45 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
49 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
50 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
51 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
52 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
53 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
54 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
55 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
56 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
57 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
58 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
59 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
61 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
64 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
65 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
66 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
68 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
69 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
70 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
75 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
76 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
77 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
78 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
80 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
81 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
82 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
83 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
84 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
85 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
88 ** Remove deprecated options
90 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
91 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
92 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
93 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
94 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
96 ** Improved robustness
98 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
99 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
100 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
101 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
102 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
103 loss of the contents of a/f.
105 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
106 in its 35-colon commmand-line argument
110 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
111 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
112 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
114 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
115 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
116 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
117 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
119 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
120 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
121 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
122 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
123 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
124 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
125 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
126 destination is a symlink.
128 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
130 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
131 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
133 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
134 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
136 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
138 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
139 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
141 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
142 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
144 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
147 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
148 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
150 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
151 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
153 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
154 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
155 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
156 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
158 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
159 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
160 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
162 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
163 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
164 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
166 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
167 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
168 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
169 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
171 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
172 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
173 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
175 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
176 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
178 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
179 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
181 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
183 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
184 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
185 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
187 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
188 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
190 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
191 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
193 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
194 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
196 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
197 [present in the original version]
200 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
204 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
206 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
207 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
208 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
210 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
211 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
213 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
217 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
218 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
220 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
221 support but with insufficient /proc support.
223 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
224 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
226 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
227 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
228 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
229 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
230 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
231 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
233 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
234 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
237 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
238 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
240 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
243 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
244 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
245 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
247 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
248 directory is unreadable.
250 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
251 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
252 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
254 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
255 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
256 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
257 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
258 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
261 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
262 Before it would print nothing.
264 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
266 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
267 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
268 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
269 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
270 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
271 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
272 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
273 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
275 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
279 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
280 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
281 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
283 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
284 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
285 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
286 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
289 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
293 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
294 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
295 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
296 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
297 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
298 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
299 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
301 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
302 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
303 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
304 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
305 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
306 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
307 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
308 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
310 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
311 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
312 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
315 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
319 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
320 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
322 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
323 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
324 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
326 ** Improved robustness
328 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
329 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
330 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
333 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
337 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
338 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
339 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
340 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
341 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
343 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
347 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
350 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
354 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
355 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
356 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
357 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
359 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
360 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
362 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
363 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
364 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
367 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
369 ** Improved robustness
371 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
372 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
374 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
375 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
376 or NFS-mounted partition.
378 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
379 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
383 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
384 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
385 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
386 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
387 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
388 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
390 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
391 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
393 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
394 or neglect to report file removal.
396 For the "groups" command:
398 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
399 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
401 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
403 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
405 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
409 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
410 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
413 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
415 ** Changes in behavior
417 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
418 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
419 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
420 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
422 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
423 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
424 a final `./' or `../' component.
426 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
427 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
430 ** Infrastructure changes
432 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
433 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
434 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
435 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
439 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
442 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
443 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
444 dirent.d_type support.
446 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
447 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
449 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
450 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
451 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
452 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
455 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
457 ** Changes in behavior
459 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
463 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
464 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
468 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
469 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
470 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
472 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
473 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
475 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
476 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
478 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
480 ** Improved robustness
482 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
483 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
484 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
486 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
487 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
490 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
491 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
493 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
494 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
496 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
497 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
499 ** Changes in behavior
501 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
502 where the two are distinct.
504 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
505 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
506 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
507 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
508 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
509 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
510 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
511 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
512 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
513 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
514 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
515 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
516 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
517 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
518 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
519 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
520 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
522 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
523 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
524 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
526 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
527 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
528 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
529 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
532 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
533 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
537 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
538 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
539 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
540 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
542 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
543 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
544 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
546 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
547 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
548 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
549 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
550 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
553 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
554 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
556 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
557 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
558 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
559 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
561 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
562 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
563 successful and the output is easier to parse.
565 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
566 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
567 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
568 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
570 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
571 and sticky) with the -m option.
573 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
574 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
575 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
576 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
577 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
579 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
580 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
582 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
586 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
587 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
588 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
589 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
591 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
593 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
595 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
596 silently ignoring one of them.
598 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
599 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
600 containing this change was 5.92.
602 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
603 automatically newline terminated.
605 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
606 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
607 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
608 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
611 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
612 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
613 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
616 ** Scheduled for removal
618 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
619 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
621 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
622 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
623 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
624 command to unlink a directory.
626 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
627 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
628 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
629 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
633 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
634 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
635 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
636 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
637 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
638 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
642 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
643 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
645 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
647 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
648 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
649 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
651 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
652 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
655 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
656 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
658 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
659 list directories before files.
661 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
662 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
663 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
664 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
667 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
669 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
671 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
672 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
673 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
675 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
676 list of NUL-terminated file names.
680 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
681 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
682 usually printing nothing.
684 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
686 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
687 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
688 them with hard-linked directories.
690 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
691 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
692 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
694 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
695 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
696 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
698 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
701 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
702 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
704 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
705 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
707 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
708 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
710 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
711 all command-line arguments.
713 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
715 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
717 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
718 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
720 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
722 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
723 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
724 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
725 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
726 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
728 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
729 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
731 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
732 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
733 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
734 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
736 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
738 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
742 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
743 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
745 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
746 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
748 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
749 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
751 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
752 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
754 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
755 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
757 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
759 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
760 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
761 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
764 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
766 ** Build-related bug fixes
768 installing .mo files would fail
771 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
775 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
777 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
780 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
784 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
785 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
789 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
791 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
792 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
794 ** Deprecated options
796 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
797 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
799 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
803 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
805 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
806 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
807 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
808 conforming to older POSIX versions.
810 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
813 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
819 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
824 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
826 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
828 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
829 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
830 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
832 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
833 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
834 problematic usages. These include:
836 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
837 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
838 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
839 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
840 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
841 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
842 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
843 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
844 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
846 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
847 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
849 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
850 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
851 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
852 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
854 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
855 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
856 between binary and text files.
858 The following programs now always use text input/output:
862 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
866 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
867 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
870 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
872 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
873 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
875 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
876 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
877 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
879 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
881 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
883 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
884 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
885 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
889 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
891 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
892 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
894 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
895 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
896 blocks until F contains N blocks.
900 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
901 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
905 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
906 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
907 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
911 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
912 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
916 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
918 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
920 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
924 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
925 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
926 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
928 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
929 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
930 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
931 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
932 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
934 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
938 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
939 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
940 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
942 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
944 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
945 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
946 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
947 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
949 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
951 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
952 rather than silently wrapping around.
954 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
955 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
957 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
958 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
960 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
961 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
962 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
965 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
967 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
969 ** Improved robustness
971 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
972 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
973 no matter how large the result.
975 ** Improved portability
977 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
978 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
980 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
982 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
983 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
984 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
986 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
987 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
991 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
992 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
994 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
996 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
997 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
998 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
999 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
1001 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
1002 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
1004 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
1005 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
1006 categories if not specified by dircolors.
1008 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
1010 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
1011 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
1013 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
1014 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
1016 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
1018 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
1019 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
1021 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
1022 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
1024 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
1025 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
1026 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
1028 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
1030 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
1032 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
1036 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
1038 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
1039 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
1040 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
1042 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
1043 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
1045 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
1046 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
1047 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
1049 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
1050 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
1052 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
1053 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
1054 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
1055 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
1057 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
1058 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
1060 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
1061 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
1062 the file system does not support it.
1064 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
1066 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
1067 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
1069 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
1071 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
1072 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
1074 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
1075 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
1076 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
1077 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
1079 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
1080 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
1083 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
1084 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
1085 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
1086 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
1088 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
1089 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
1090 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
1091 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
1093 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
1094 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
1096 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
1098 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
1099 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
1100 reporting incorrect results.
1104 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
1105 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
1107 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
1110 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
1112 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
1113 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
1115 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
1116 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
1118 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
1121 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
1122 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
1123 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
1124 the file name does not look like a page range.
1126 printf has several changes:
1128 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
1129 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
1131 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
1132 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
1133 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
1135 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
1136 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
1139 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
1140 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
1142 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
1143 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
1145 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
1147 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
1148 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
1150 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
1152 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
1154 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
1155 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
1156 when first encountering the directory.
1160 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
1161 output; POSIX requires this.
1163 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
1164 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
1166 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
1168 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
1169 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
1171 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
1172 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
1174 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
1175 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
1176 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
1177 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
1178 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
1179 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
1180 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
1182 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
1183 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
1184 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
1186 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
1187 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
1189 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
1191 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
1193 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
1194 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
1195 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
1196 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
1198 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
1202 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
1203 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
1204 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
1205 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
1206 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
1208 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
1209 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
1210 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
1212 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
1213 is longer than PATH_MAX.
1215 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
1216 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
1218 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
1219 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
1220 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
1221 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
1222 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
1224 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
1225 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
1227 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
1228 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
1230 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
1232 nocreat do not create the output file
1233 excl fail if the output file already exists
1234 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
1235 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
1237 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
1239 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
1240 direct use direct I/O for data
1241 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
1242 sync likewise, but also for metadata
1243 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
1244 nofollow do not follow symlinks
1245 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
1247 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
1249 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
1250 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
1253 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
1254 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
1255 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
1256 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
1257 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
1258 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
1260 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1261 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1263 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
1266 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
1268 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
1270 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
1271 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
1273 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
1274 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
1275 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
1277 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
1278 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
1279 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
1281 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
1283 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
1284 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
1286 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
1287 for compatibility with bash.
1289 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
1291 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
1292 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
1293 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
1294 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
1296 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
1297 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
1299 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
1300 ls supports TABSIZE.
1301 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
1302 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
1303 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
1305 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
1308 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
1310 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
1311 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
1312 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
1313 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
1314 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
1315 an offset, not as a file name.
1317 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
1318 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
1320 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
1321 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
1323 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
1324 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
1326 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
1327 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
1328 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
1330 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
1331 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
1333 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
1334 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
1338 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
1340 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
1342 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
1346 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
1347 or more arguments between partitions.
1349 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
1350 holes in the destination.
1352 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
1353 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
1354 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
1355 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
1356 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
1357 terminates immediately.
1359 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
1361 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
1363 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
1364 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
1365 not the empty string.
1367 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
1368 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
1372 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
1373 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
1374 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
1377 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
1384 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
1388 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
1389 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
1391 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
1392 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
1394 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
1395 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
1396 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
1399 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
1403 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
1404 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
1406 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
1407 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
1409 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
1410 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
1411 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
1413 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
1415 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
1418 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
1420 ** Configuration option
1422 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
1423 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
1427 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
1428 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
1432 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
1433 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
1434 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
1437 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
1438 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
1439 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
1440 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
1441 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
1442 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
1443 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
1446 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
1450 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
1451 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
1452 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
1454 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
1455 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
1457 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
1459 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
1460 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
1461 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
1462 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
1464 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
1466 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
1467 not just the ones that reference directories
1469 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
1470 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
1472 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
1473 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
1474 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
1476 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
1477 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
1478 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
1479 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
1480 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
1481 ragged when a datum was too wide.
1483 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
1488 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
1489 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
1491 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
1493 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
1495 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
1497 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
1498 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
1500 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
1501 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
1503 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
1505 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
1509 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
1511 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
1513 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
1514 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
1515 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
1516 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
1517 resolution is the best we can do right now.
1519 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
1520 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
1522 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
1523 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
1525 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
1526 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
1528 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
1529 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
1530 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
1534 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
1535 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
1536 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
1537 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
1538 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
1539 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
1540 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
1541 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
1542 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
1543 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
1544 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
1545 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
1546 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
1547 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
1549 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
1551 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
1552 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
1554 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
1556 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
1558 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
1559 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
1561 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
1563 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
1564 without a trailing newline.
1566 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
1567 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
1569 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
1572 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
1576 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
1578 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
1580 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
1581 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
1582 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
1583 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
1585 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
1587 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
1588 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
1589 be printed without leading spaces.
1591 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
1592 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
1597 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
1598 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
1599 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
1601 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
1603 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
1604 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
1606 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
1607 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
1609 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
1610 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
1612 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
1614 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
1616 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
1618 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
1619 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
1621 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
1623 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
1625 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
1626 byte offsets are specified.
1629 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
1632 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
1635 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
1636 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
1637 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
1638 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
1639 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
1640 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
1641 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
1642 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
1643 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
1644 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
1645 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
1646 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
1647 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
1648 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
1649 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
1650 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
1651 directory where M has write access.
1652 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
1653 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
1654 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
1657 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
1658 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
1659 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
1660 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
1661 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
1662 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
1663 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
1664 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
1665 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
1666 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
1667 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
1668 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
1669 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
1670 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
1671 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
1672 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
1673 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
1674 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
1675 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
1676 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
1677 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
1678 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
1679 appeared one additional time.
1681 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
1682 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
1683 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
1684 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
1687 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
1688 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
1689 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
1690 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
1691 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
1692 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
1693 if there were more than 338.
1695 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
1696 - false --help now exits nonzero
1699 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
1700 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
1701 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
1702 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
1705 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
1706 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
1707 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
1708 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
1709 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
1712 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
1713 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
1714 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
1715 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
1716 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
1717 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
1718 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
1721 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
1722 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
1723 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
1724 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
1725 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
1726 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
1728 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
1729 under certain unusual conditions
1730 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
1731 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
1734 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
1735 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
1736 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
1737 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
1738 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
1739 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
1740 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
1741 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
1742 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
1743 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
1744 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
1745 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
1746 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
1747 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
1748 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
1749 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
1752 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
1753 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
1756 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
1757 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
1758 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
1759 involving hard-linked directories
1760 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
1761 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
1762 character-special and block files
1765 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
1766 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
1767 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
1768 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
1769 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
1770 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
1771 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
1772 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
1773 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
1775 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
1776 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
1777 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
1778 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
1779 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
1780 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
1781 specified on the command line.
1782 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
1783 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
1784 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
1785 the first file untouched.
1786 * readlink: new program
1787 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
1788 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
1789 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
1790 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
1791 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
1792 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
1795 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
1796 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
1797 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
1798 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
1799 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
1800 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
1801 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
1802 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
1803 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
1804 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
1805 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
1806 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
1808 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
1809 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
1810 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
1812 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
1813 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
1814 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
1815 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
1816 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
1817 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
1818 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
1819 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
1822 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
1823 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
1826 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
1827 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
1828 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
1829 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
1830 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
1831 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
1832 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
1835 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
1836 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
1838 ========================================================================
1839 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
1840 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
1843 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
1845 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
1846 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
1847 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
1848 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
1849 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
1850 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
1851 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
1852 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
1853 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
1854 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
1855 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
1856 The old options will continue to work for a while.
1858 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
1859 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
1860 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
1861 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
1863 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
1866 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
1868 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
1869 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
1870 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
1871 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
1872 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
1873 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
1874 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
1877 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
1878 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
1879 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
1880 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
1881 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
1882 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
1883 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
1884 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
1885 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
1886 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
1887 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
1888 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
1889 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
1890 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
1891 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
1892 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
1894 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
1895 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
1897 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
1898 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
1899 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
1900 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
1901 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
1902 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
1904 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
1905 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
1906 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
1907 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
1908 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
1909 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
1910 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
1912 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
1913 the source files in the following example:
1914 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
1915 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
1916 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
1917 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
1918 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
1919 links between source files with --preserve=links
1920 * cp accepts new options:
1921 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
1922 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
1923 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
1924 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
1925 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
1926 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
1927 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
1928 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
1929 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
1931 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
1932 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
1933 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
1934 even though it's older than dest.
1935 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
1936 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
1937 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
1938 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
1939 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
1941 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
1942 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
1943 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
1944 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
1945 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
1946 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
1947 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
1949 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
1950 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
1951 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
1953 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
1954 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
1955 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
1956 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
1957 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
1958 This is the default.
1960 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
1961 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
1962 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
1963 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
1964 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
1966 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
1969 ========================================================================
1970 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
1971 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
1974 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
1975 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
1977 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
1978 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
1979 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
1980 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
1981 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
1983 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
1984 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
1985 that specifies a non-directory
1988 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
1989 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
1990 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
1991 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
1992 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
1993 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
1994 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
1995 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
1996 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
1997 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
1998 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
1999 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
2000 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
2001 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
2002 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
2003 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
2004 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
2005 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
2006 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
2007 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
2008 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
2009 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
2010 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
2011 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
2013 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
2014 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
2015 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
2017 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
2019 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
2020 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
2022 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
2023 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
2024 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
2025 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
2026 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
2028 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
2029 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
2030 required support; from Bruno Haible.
2031 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
2032 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
2034 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
2036 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
2037 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
2038 * still more portability fixes
2039 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
2040 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2042 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
2044 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
2046 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
2048 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
2049 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
2050 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
2051 there is any time remaining
2052 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
2054 ========================================================================
2055 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2056 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
2058 This package began as the union of the following:
2059 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
2061 ========================================================================
2063 Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 Free Software
2066 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
2067 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
2068 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
2069 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
2070 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
2071 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.