1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
6 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
10 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
11 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
13 ** Changes in behavior
15 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
16 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
17 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
18 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
19 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
20 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
22 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
23 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
24 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
28 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
31 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
35 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
36 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
37 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
39 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
40 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
41 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
43 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
44 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
45 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
47 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
48 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
50 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
51 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
53 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
54 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
56 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
57 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
61 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
62 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
63 processed portion thereof.
65 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
66 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
68 ** Changes in behavior
70 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
71 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
72 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
74 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
75 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
76 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
78 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
79 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
81 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
82 Use --preserve-context instead.
84 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
87 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
91 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
92 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
93 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
94 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
95 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
97 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
98 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
100 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
101 reject file names invalid for that file system.
103 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
104 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
108 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
109 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
110 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
111 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
112 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
113 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
114 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
115 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
117 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
118 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
119 the same number of fields are output for each line.
121 ** Changes in behavior
123 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
124 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
125 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
128 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
132 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
133 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
134 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
137 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
141 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
142 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
144 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
145 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
147 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
148 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
150 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
151 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
152 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
153 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
155 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
156 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
158 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
159 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
160 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
162 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
164 ** Changes in behavior
166 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
167 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
168 to the number of available processors.
172 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
175 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
179 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
180 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
181 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
182 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
184 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
185 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
186 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
188 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
189 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
191 ** Changes in behavior
193 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
194 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
196 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
197 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
198 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
199 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
200 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
201 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
203 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
204 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
205 the same way as the others.
208 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
212 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
213 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
214 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
216 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
217 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
219 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
220 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
221 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
223 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
224 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
226 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
227 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
229 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
230 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
231 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
233 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
234 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
235 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
236 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
240 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
241 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
243 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
246 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
247 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
249 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
251 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
252 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
253 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
255 ** Changes in behavior
257 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
258 rather than its aliased target.
260 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
261 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
262 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
264 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
265 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
266 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
267 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
268 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
269 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
270 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
271 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
273 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
275 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
277 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
278 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
281 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
282 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
283 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
284 control like taskset for example.
286 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
288 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
289 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
290 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
291 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
292 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
293 includes %C when context information is available.
295 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
296 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
297 rather than a file system attribute.
299 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
300 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
301 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
302 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
304 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
305 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
306 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
308 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
309 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
310 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
313 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
317 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
318 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
320 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
322 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
323 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
325 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
326 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
327 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
328 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
330 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
331 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
332 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
336 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
337 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
339 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
340 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
341 duration after the initial signal was sent.
343 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
344 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
345 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
346 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
347 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
348 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
349 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
350 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
351 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
353 ** Changes in behavior
355 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
356 sequence when it would be a no-op.
358 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
359 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
362 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
366 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
367 of available processors, which may not have been the case
368 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
369 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
373 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
374 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
376 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
377 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
378 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
379 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
381 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
382 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
383 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
386 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
390 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
391 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
392 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
394 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
395 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
396 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
398 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
399 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
401 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
402 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
403 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
404 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
406 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
407 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
408 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
410 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
411 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
412 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
413 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
415 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
416 renamed-aside and then recreated.
417 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
419 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
420 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
421 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
422 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
424 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
425 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
426 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
428 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
429 processes will not intersperse their output.
430 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
433 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
437 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
438 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
440 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
441 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
443 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
444 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
445 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
446 the presence of the empty string argument.
447 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
449 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
450 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
451 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
452 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
454 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
455 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
457 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
458 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
459 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
461 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
462 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
463 and with a malicious user on the same system
464 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
465 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
468 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
472 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
473 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
474 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
476 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
477 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
478 offending directory and all "contents."
480 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
481 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
482 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
484 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
485 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
486 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
488 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
489 processes will not intersperse their output.
490 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
491 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
493 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
494 output the name of the file to stdout.
495 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
497 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
498 call fails with errno == EACCES.
499 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
501 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
502 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
505 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
506 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
507 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
509 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
510 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
511 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
512 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
513 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
514 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
516 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
517 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
518 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
519 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
521 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
522 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
524 ** Changes in behavior
526 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
527 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
528 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
529 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
530 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
532 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
533 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
534 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
535 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
537 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
539 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
540 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
541 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
542 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
543 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
547 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
551 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
552 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
554 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
555 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
557 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
558 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
559 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
561 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
562 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
565 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
569 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
570 when the source file doesn't have write access.
571 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
573 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
574 to accommodate leap seconds.
575 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
577 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
578 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
579 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
581 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
583 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
584 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
585 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
587 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
588 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
589 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
590 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
591 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
595 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
596 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
597 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
598 directory or a symlink to a directory.
600 ** Changes in behavior
602 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
603 environment variable is set.
605 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
606 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
607 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
611 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
612 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
613 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
614 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
616 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
617 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
618 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
619 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
623 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
624 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
625 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
627 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
628 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
629 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
630 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
631 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
632 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
635 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
636 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
639 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
643 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
644 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
645 and libraries tested at configure time.
646 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
648 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
649 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
651 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
652 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
654 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
655 printing a summary to stderr.
656 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
658 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
659 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
660 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
662 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
663 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
665 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
666 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
667 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
668 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
670 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
671 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
672 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
673 which is relatively unusual.
674 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
676 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
677 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
678 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
679 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
680 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
681 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
682 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
686 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
687 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
688 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
689 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
690 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
694 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
695 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
697 ** Changes in behavior
699 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
700 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
701 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
702 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
703 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
706 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
710 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
711 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
713 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
714 before data copying has started.
716 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
717 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
719 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
720 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
721 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
722 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
724 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
725 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
726 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
727 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
729 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
734 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
735 for its standard streams.
737 ** Changes in behavior
739 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
740 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
741 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
742 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
743 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
744 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
746 ** Deprecated options
748 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
749 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
753 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
755 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
756 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
759 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
761 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
762 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
764 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
765 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
768 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
772 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
773 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
774 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
775 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
777 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
778 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
779 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
780 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
781 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
786 make check: two tests have been corrected
790 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
791 inherited from gnulib.
794 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
798 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
799 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
800 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
801 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
803 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
804 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
806 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
808 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
809 systems without xattr support.
811 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
812 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
813 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
815 ** Changes in behavior
817 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
818 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
819 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
820 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
822 ** Improved robustness
824 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
825 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
826 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
827 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
828 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
829 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
830 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
831 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
832 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
836 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
837 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
839 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
840 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
841 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
842 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
843 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
846 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
850 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
851 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
852 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
856 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
857 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
858 data was read, or on process exit.
859 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
861 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
862 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
863 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
864 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
866 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
867 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
868 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
869 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
871 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
872 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
874 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
875 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
877 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
878 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
879 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
881 ** Changes in behavior
883 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
884 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
885 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
887 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
888 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
890 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
891 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
892 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
895 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
899 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
901 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
902 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
903 install: Never copies xattrs
905 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
906 from overwriting any existing destination file
908 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
909 mode where this feature is available.
911 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
912 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
913 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
914 do not modify the destination at all.
916 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
918 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
922 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
923 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
925 cp uses much less memory in some situations
927 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
928 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
930 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
931 processing the first file name
933 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
934 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
935 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
936 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
938 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
939 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
941 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
942 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
945 ** Changes in behavior
947 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
948 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
950 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
951 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
952 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
954 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
955 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
957 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
959 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
960 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
961 is still marked with a '+'.
964 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
968 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
969 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
973 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
974 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
975 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
976 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
977 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
978 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
980 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
981 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
983 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
984 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
986 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
988 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
989 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
990 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
992 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
993 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
995 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
996 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
997 used to factor large numbers.
999 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1002 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1004 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1006 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1007 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1009 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1010 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1011 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1012 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1014 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1015 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1016 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1018 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1019 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1023 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1025 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1026 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1028 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1029 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1031 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1033 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1034 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1038 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1039 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1040 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1042 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1044 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1045 no matter how many files are in a given directory
1047 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1048 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1049 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1051 ** Changes in behavior
1053 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1054 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1057 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1061 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1063 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1064 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1065 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1067 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1068 with no USERNAME argument.
1070 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1071 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1072 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1074 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1075 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1076 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1077 number of fields for some inputs.
1079 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1080 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1082 ** Changes in behavior
1084 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1085 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1088 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1092 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1094 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1095 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1096 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1097 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1099 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1100 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1102 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1103 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1105 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1106 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1108 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1109 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1110 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1111 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1113 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1114 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1115 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1116 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1117 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1118 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1120 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1121 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1123 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1124 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1125 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1127 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1128 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1130 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1131 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1133 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1134 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1135 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1136 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1138 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1139 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1141 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1142 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1144 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1145 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1146 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1150 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1151 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1153 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1154 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1155 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1156 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1160 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1161 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1163 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1165 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1169 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1170 which have negative errno values.
1174 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1178 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1182 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1183 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1186 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1190 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1191 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1192 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1194 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1195 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1196 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1197 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1201 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1202 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1203 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1204 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1207 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1211 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1213 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1214 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1215 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1218 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1222 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1223 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1225 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1227 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1229 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1231 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1235 ** Changes in behavior
1237 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1238 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1240 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1241 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1243 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1244 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1245 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1249 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1250 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1251 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1252 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1253 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1254 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1255 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1256 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1257 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1258 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1259 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1261 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1262 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1263 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1266 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1269 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1270 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1271 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1273 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1274 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1275 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1278 ** New build options
1280 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1281 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1282 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1283 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1285 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1286 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1287 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1288 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1289 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1290 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1291 of "make check" fail.
1293 ** Remove deprecated options
1295 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1296 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1297 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1298 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1299 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1301 ** Improved robustness
1303 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1304 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1305 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1306 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1307 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1308 loss of the contents of a/f.
1310 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1311 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1315 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1316 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1317 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1319 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1320 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1321 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1322 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1324 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1325 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1326 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1327 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1328 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1329 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1330 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1331 destination is a symlink.
1333 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1335 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1336 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1338 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1339 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1341 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1343 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1344 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1346 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1347 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1349 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1352 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1353 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1355 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1356 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1358 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1359 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1360 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1361 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1363 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1364 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1365 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1367 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1368 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1369 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1371 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1372 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1373 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1374 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1376 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1377 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1378 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1380 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1381 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1383 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1384 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1386 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1388 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1389 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1390 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1392 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1393 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1395 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1396 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1398 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1399 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1401 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1402 [present in the original version]
1405 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1409 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1411 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1412 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1413 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1415 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1416 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1418 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1422 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1423 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1425 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1426 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1428 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1429 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1431 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1432 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1433 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1434 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1435 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1436 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1438 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1439 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1442 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1443 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1445 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1448 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1449 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1450 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1452 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1453 directory is unreadable.
1455 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1456 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1457 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1459 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1460 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1461 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1462 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1463 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1466 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1467 Before it would print nothing.
1469 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1471 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1472 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1473 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1474 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1475 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1476 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1477 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1478 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1480 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1484 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1485 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1486 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1488 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1489 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1490 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1491 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1494 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1498 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1499 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1500 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1501 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1502 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1503 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1504 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1506 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1507 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1508 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1509 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1510 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1511 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1512 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1513 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1515 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1516 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1517 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1520 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1524 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1525 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1527 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1528 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1529 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1531 ** Improved robustness
1533 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1534 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1535 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1538 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1542 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1543 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1544 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1545 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1546 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1548 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1552 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1555 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1559 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1560 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1561 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1562 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1564 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1565 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1567 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1568 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1569 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1572 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1574 ** Improved robustness
1576 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1577 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1579 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1580 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1581 or NFS-mounted partition.
1583 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1584 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1588 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1589 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1590 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1591 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1592 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1593 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1595 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1596 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1598 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1599 or neglect to report file removal.
1601 For the "groups" command:
1603 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1604 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1606 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1608 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1610 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1614 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1615 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1618 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1620 ** Changes in behavior
1622 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1623 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1624 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1625 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1627 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1628 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1629 a final `./' or `../' component.
1631 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1632 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1633 this only for pipes.
1635 ** Infrastructure changes
1637 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1638 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1639 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1640 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1644 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1645 name is "." or "..".
1647 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1648 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1649 dirent.d_type support.
1651 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1652 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1654 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1655 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1656 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1657 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1660 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1662 ** Changes in behavior
1664 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1668 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1669 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1673 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1674 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1675 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1677 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1678 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1680 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1681 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1683 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1685 ** Improved robustness
1687 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1688 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1689 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1691 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1692 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1695 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1696 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1698 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1699 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1701 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1702 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1704 ** Changes in behavior
1706 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1707 where the two are distinct.
1709 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1710 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1711 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1712 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1713 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1714 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1715 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1716 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1717 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1718 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1719 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1720 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1721 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1722 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1723 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1724 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1725 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1727 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1728 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1729 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1731 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1732 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1733 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1734 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1737 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1738 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1742 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1743 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1744 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1745 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1747 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1748 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1749 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1751 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1752 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1753 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1754 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1755 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1758 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1759 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1761 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1762 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1763 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1764 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1766 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1767 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1768 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1770 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1771 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1772 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1773 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1775 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1776 and sticky) with the -m option.
1778 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1779 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1780 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1781 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1782 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1784 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1785 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1787 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1791 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1792 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1793 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1794 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1796 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1798 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1800 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1801 silently ignoring one of them.
1803 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1804 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1805 containing this change was 5.92.
1807 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1808 automatically newline terminated.
1810 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1811 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1812 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1813 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1816 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1817 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1818 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1821 ** Scheduled for removal
1823 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1824 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1826 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1827 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1828 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1829 command to unlink a directory.
1831 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1832 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1833 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1834 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1838 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1839 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1840 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1841 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1842 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1843 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1847 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1848 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1850 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1852 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1853 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1854 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1856 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1857 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1860 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1861 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1863 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1864 list directories before files.
1866 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1867 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1868 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1869 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1872 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1874 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1876 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1877 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1878 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1880 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1881 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1885 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1886 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1887 usually printing nothing.
1889 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1891 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1892 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1893 them with hard-linked directories.
1895 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1896 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1897 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1899 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1900 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1901 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1903 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1906 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1907 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1909 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1910 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1912 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1913 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1915 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1916 all command-line arguments.
1918 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1920 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1922 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1923 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1925 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1927 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1928 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1929 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1930 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1931 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1933 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1934 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1936 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1937 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1938 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1939 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1941 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1943 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1947 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1948 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1950 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1951 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1953 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1954 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1956 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1957 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1959 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1960 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1962 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1964 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1965 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1966 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1969 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1971 ** Build-related bug fixes
1973 installing .mo files would fail
1976 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1980 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1982 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1985 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1989 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1990 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1994 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1996 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1997 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1999 ** Deprecated options
2001 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2002 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
2004 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2008 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2010 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2011 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2012 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2013 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2015 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2018 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2024 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2029 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2031 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2033 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2034 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2035 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2037 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2038 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2039 problematic usages. These include:
2041 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2042 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2043 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2044 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2045 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2046 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2047 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2048 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2049 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2051 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2052 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2054 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2055 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2056 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2057 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2059 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2060 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2061 between binary and text files.
2063 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2067 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2071 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2072 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2074 head tac tail tee tr
2075 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2077 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2078 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2080 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2081 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2082 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2084 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2086 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2088 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2089 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2090 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2094 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2096 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2097 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2099 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2100 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2101 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2105 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2106 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2110 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2111 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2112 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2116 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2117 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2121 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2123 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2125 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2129 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2130 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2131 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2133 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2134 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2135 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2136 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2137 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2139 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2143 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2144 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2145 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2147 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2149 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2150 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2151 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2152 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2154 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2156 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2157 rather than silently wrapping around.
2159 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2160 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2162 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2163 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2165 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2166 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2167 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2168 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2170 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2172 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2174 ** Improved robustness
2176 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2177 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2178 no matter how large the result.
2180 ** Improved portability
2182 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2183 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2185 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2187 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2188 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2189 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2191 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2192 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2196 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2197 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2199 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2201 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2202 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2203 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2204 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2206 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2207 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2209 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2210 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2211 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2213 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2215 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2216 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2218 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2219 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2221 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2223 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2224 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2226 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2227 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2229 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2230 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2231 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2233 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2235 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2237 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2241 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2243 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2244 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2245 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2247 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2248 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2250 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2251 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2252 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2254 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2255 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2257 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2258 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2259 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2260 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2262 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2263 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2265 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2266 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2267 the file system does not support it.
2269 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2271 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2272 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2274 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2276 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2277 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2279 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2280 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2281 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2282 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2284 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2285 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2288 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2289 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2290 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2291 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2293 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2294 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2295 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2296 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2298 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2299 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2301 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2303 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2304 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2305 reporting incorrect results.
2309 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2310 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2312 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2315 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2317 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2318 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2320 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2321 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2323 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2326 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2327 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2328 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2329 the file name does not look like a page range.
2331 printf has several changes:
2333 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2334 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2336 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2337 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2338 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2340 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2341 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2344 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2345 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2347 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2348 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2350 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2352 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2353 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2355 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2357 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2359 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2360 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2361 when first encountering the directory.
2365 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2366 output; POSIX requires this.
2368 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2369 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2371 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2373 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2374 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2376 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2377 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2379 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2380 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2381 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2382 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2383 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2384 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2385 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2387 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2388 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2389 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2391 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2392 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2394 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2396 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2398 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2399 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2400 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2401 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2403 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2407 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2408 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2409 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2410 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2411 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2413 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2414 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2415 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2417 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2418 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2420 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2421 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2423 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2424 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2425 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2426 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2427 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2429 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2430 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2432 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2433 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2435 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2437 nocreat do not create the output file
2438 excl fail if the output file already exists
2439 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2440 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2442 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2444 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2445 direct use direct I/O for data
2446 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2447 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2448 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2449 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2450 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2452 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2454 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2455 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2458 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2459 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2460 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2461 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2462 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2463 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2465 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2466 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2468 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2471 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2473 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2475 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2476 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2478 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2479 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2480 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2482 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2483 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2484 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2486 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2488 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2489 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2491 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2492 for compatibility with bash.
2494 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2496 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2497 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2498 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2499 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2501 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2502 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2504 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2505 ls supports TABSIZE.
2506 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2507 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2508 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2510 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2513 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2515 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2516 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2517 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2518 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2519 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2520 an offset, not as a file name.
2522 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2523 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2525 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2526 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2528 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2529 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2531 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2532 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2533 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2535 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2536 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2538 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2539 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2543 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2545 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2547 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2551 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2552 or more arguments between partitions.
2554 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2555 holes in the destination.
2557 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2558 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2559 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2560 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2561 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2562 terminates immediately.
2564 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2566 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2568 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2569 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2570 not the empty string.
2572 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2573 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2577 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2578 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2579 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2582 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2589 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2593 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2594 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2596 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2597 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2599 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2600 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2601 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2604 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2608 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2609 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2611 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2612 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2614 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2615 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2616 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2618 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2620 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2623 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2625 ** Configuration option
2627 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2628 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2632 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2633 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2637 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2638 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2639 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2642 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2643 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2644 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2645 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2646 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2647 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2648 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2651 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2655 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2656 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2657 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2659 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2660 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2662 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2664 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2665 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2666 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2667 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2669 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2671 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2672 not just the ones that reference directories
2674 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2675 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2677 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2678 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2679 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2681 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2682 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2683 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2684 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2685 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2686 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2688 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2693 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2694 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2696 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2698 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2700 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2702 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2703 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2705 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2706 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2708 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2710 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2714 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2716 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2718 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2719 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2720 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2721 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2722 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2724 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2725 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2727 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2728 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2730 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2731 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2733 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2734 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2735 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2739 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2740 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2741 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2742 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2743 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2744 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2745 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2746 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2747 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2748 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2749 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2750 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2751 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2752 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2754 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2756 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2757 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2759 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2761 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2763 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2764 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2766 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2768 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2769 without a trailing newline.
2771 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2772 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2774 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2777 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2781 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2783 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2785 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2786 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2787 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2788 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2790 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2792 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2793 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2794 be printed without leading spaces.
2796 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2797 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2802 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2803 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2804 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2806 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2808 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2809 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2811 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2812 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2814 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2815 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2817 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2819 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2821 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2823 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2824 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2826 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2828 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2830 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2831 byte offsets are specified.
2834 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2837 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2840 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2841 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2842 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2843 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2844 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2845 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2846 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2847 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2848 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2849 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2850 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2851 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2852 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2853 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2854 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2855 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2856 directory where M has write access.
2857 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2858 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2859 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2862 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2863 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2864 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2865 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2866 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2867 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2868 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2869 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2870 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2871 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2872 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2873 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2874 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2875 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2876 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2877 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2878 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2879 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2880 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2881 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2882 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2883 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2884 appeared one additional time.
2886 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2887 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2888 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2889 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2892 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2893 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2894 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2895 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2896 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2897 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2898 if there were more than 338.
2900 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2901 - false --help now exits nonzero
2904 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2905 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2906 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2907 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2910 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2911 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2912 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2913 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2914 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2917 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2918 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2919 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2920 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2921 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2922 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2923 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2926 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2927 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2928 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2929 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2930 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2931 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2933 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2934 under certain unusual conditions
2935 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2936 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2939 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2940 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2941 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2942 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2943 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2944 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2945 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2946 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2947 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2948 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2949 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2950 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2951 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2952 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2953 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2954 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2957 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2958 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2961 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2962 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2963 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2964 involving hard-linked directories
2965 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2966 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2967 character-special and block files
2970 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2971 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2972 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2973 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2974 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2975 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2976 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2977 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2978 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2980 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2981 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2982 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2983 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2984 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2985 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2986 specified on the command line.
2987 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2988 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2989 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2990 the first file untouched.
2991 * readlink: new program
2992 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2993 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2994 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2995 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2996 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2997 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3000 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3001 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3002 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3003 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3004 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3005 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3006 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3007 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3008 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3009 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3010 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3011 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3013 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3014 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3015 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3017 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3018 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3019 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3020 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3021 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3022 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3023 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3024 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3027 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3028 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3031 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3032 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3033 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3034 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3035 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3036 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3037 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3040 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3041 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3043 ========================================================================
3044 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3045 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3048 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3050 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3051 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3052 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3053 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3054 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3055 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3056 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3057 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3058 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3059 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3060 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3061 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3063 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3064 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3065 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3066 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3068 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3071 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3073 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3074 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3075 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3076 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3077 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3078 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3079 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3082 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3083 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3084 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3085 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3086 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3087 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3088 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3089 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3090 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3091 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3092 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3093 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3094 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3095 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3096 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3097 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3099 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3100 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3102 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3103 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3104 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3105 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3106 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3107 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3109 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3110 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3111 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3112 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3113 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3114 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3115 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3117 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3118 the source files in the following example:
3119 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3120 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3121 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3122 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3123 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3124 links between source files with --preserve=links
3125 * cp accepts new options:
3126 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3127 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3128 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3129 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3130 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3131 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3132 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3133 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3134 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3136 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3137 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3138 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3139 even though it's older than dest.
3140 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3141 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3142 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3143 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3144 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3146 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3147 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3148 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3149 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3150 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3151 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3152 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3154 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3155 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3156 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3158 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3159 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3160 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3161 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3162 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3163 This is the default.
3165 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3166 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3167 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3168 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3169 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3171 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3174 ========================================================================
3175 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3176 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3179 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3180 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3182 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3183 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3184 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3185 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3186 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3188 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3189 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3190 that specifies a non-directory
3193 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3194 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3195 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3196 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3197 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3198 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3199 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3200 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3201 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3202 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3203 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3204 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3205 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3206 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3207 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3208 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3209 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3210 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3211 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3212 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3213 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3214 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3215 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3216 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3218 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3219 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3220 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3222 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3224 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3225 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3227 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3228 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3229 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3230 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3231 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3233 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3234 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3235 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3236 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3237 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3239 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3241 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3242 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3243 * still more portability fixes
3244 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3245 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3247 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3249 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3251 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3253 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3254 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3255 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3256 there is any time remaining
3257 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3259 ========================================================================
3260 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3261 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3263 This package began as the union of the following:
3264 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3266 ========================================================================
3268 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3270 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3271 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3272 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3273 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3274 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3275 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.